There wasn’t a great deal of fuss made last week when the Advertising Association revealed the official UK ad revenue figures for 2012. It was quite a quiet revolution. But I think there should have been more fuss made. So here’s some I should have made earlier.

Firstly, the industry should congratulate the Advertising Association for listening to it – no mean feat when there are so many parties keen to express an opinion – and acting. This year they significantly changed how they report ad spend to better reflect the advertising landscape.

Big wow, you might say. The numbers have been cut slightly differently. Stop making such a fuss about it and tell me how awesome TV advertising is.

Well, TV advertising is awesome, but the change by the AA has made TV’s and other content media’s awesomeness more obvious. I’m putting words in their mouths here, but the AA has – tacitly at least – acknowledged that the internet is a technology, not a medium, and that it is used by many multi-platform media. So online revenue from newsbrands is now assigned to newsbrands, Broadcaster VOD revenue is assigned to TV, online magazine revenue is in the magazine brands pot.

They have made it far fairer and given credit where it is due. This makes sense. It is only right that the online ad revenues from high-quality content are given the right home, rather than living in the same cluttered box as search or social media advertising as they have previously. These are substantial and growing revenue streams now. We should all welcome the greater clarity. If nothing else, it makes it clearer how content media are expanding. The AA should be saluted for making the change.

Another reason for some fuss is the fact that UK adspend hit £17 billion again for the first time since 2007. This is a remarkable moment. In real terms it is still a little behind 2007, but let’s not be churlish. Advertising is on the right course, and the AA has proven itself in recent years to be a steady hand on its tiller – not least through its vigorous lobbying on our behalf, its investment in proving the value of advertising to the UK economy (£100 billion in case you didn’t know), and the confident industry platform that its annual Lead conference has become.

Anyone familiar with Thinkbox and some of the points we have raised in recent years will not be surprised that we think the Advertising Association could go even further and stop reporting ‘the internet’ as a single advertising number. But that debate is ongoing. For the moment, we should recognise that their new approach to reporting ad revenue may look like a small step at first, but it is a giant leap in the right direction.

Two things happened when I read this week’s report that Gavin Darby, chief executive of Premier Foods, had followed up his good financial results with the statement that his company would be “unashamedly sticking with TV advertising”.

Firstly, I gave a little inner cheer for Premier Foods and their supreme good sense at investing in TV advertising. But then I couldn’t help sighing over the word ‘unashamedly’ and the fact he felt the need to use it.

Why should he feel even a tad guilty at using TV when it has never been cheaper in real terms or as effective or as technologically dynamic. Why does he need to apologise to anyone?  He should be celebrated for being clever and sensible and immune to fashion.

Sadly we work in an industry that gets worryingly close to ignoring sensible because it is a bit boring. Tried and trusted is not earth-shattering enough. It doesn’t impress your friends and it wins fewer awards, partly because most award schemes these days seem to delight in adding special categories just for mobile, social etc in a way that they would never dream of doing for, say, in-store marketing or customer publishing.

Internet ‘fundamentalists’ are still deriding marketers for using TV.  It’s about time we turned the tables on them and deride them for their tunnel vision.   Intermediaries are panicking creative agencies, excluding them from pitch lists if they don’t put ‘digital’ at the heart of their offering, whatever that means.   Andrew Melsom even went so far as to recommend that advertisers specifically rule out TV in their briefing.  My advice: explain that TV is the biggest ‘digital’ medium in the UK.

And there are even some advertisers who love to make agencies feel guilty for recommending TV.  And if those agencies are not sure of their facts they can get cowed into recommending a less effective lead medium. Maybe the advertisers deserve that outcome.  But this is where we can help.  We have the facts, we have the evidence.  We delight in being pushed to prove how effective TV advertising is, on its own or integrated with other media.

The short-list for the Thinkbox TV Planning Awards has just been announced; 21 inspiring papers proving why marketers should be confident and proud of using TV to drive their business – and there are another 77 TV-tastic entries that didn’t quite make the short-list but are full of great ideas and evidence.

So come on, don’t let anyone make you feel guilty about using TV.  Get the facts under your belt so you can push back when some idiot says that TV is dead.  Let’s all be shameless in declaring our love for TV.

‘It only takes a second to score a goal’ is one of the most exasperating things people say. Obviously you hope they are saying it during a football match rather than, say, in the throes of passion, but in any context it’s annoying. It ignores all the effort that has gone into creating the opportunity for the goal to be scored: the passing, the movement, the persistence, the skill, the training – and the luck of course.

I was reminded of this when advertising’s provocative centre forward Trevor Beattie recently announced the death of the 30 second spot. He wasn’t the first to do this and he won’t be the last sadly, but his ‘death’ was different. It wasn’t about the level of TV advertising as a medium but about its unit of consumption. His argument was that, for the “tapas generation”, 30 seconds has become “boring” because “our absorption of information these days is so fast”. His solution was that 5 seconds should become the new basic unit of consumption in TV advertising.

He gave an example. He showed a 5 second ad for Persil which featured a white shirt on a washing line blowing in the breeze on a sunny day with the Persil logo in the corner. It was actually rather lovely and effective, but I’m not entirely sure this approach would be so meaningful for a new detergent brand that hadn’t invested many hours of 30-seconds over decades to become associated with white shirts blowing in a summer breeze on washing lines. Persil has played the beautiful game of advertising for decades to enable it to score that particular goal.

But Trevor’s idea was not, as some have reported, that all ads should be 5 seconds. You could do that now if you wanted to – 2 seconds even; we’ve had blipverts for many years. But why would you want to?

Being anally retentive as we are, we thought we’d check to see what the trends in ad lengths have been in TV over the last 10 years – the supposedly ‘tapas’ years. The most telling thing from the analysis is how little change there has been. Yes, the number of TV ads that are 5 seconds long has increased slightly (but then all ads have increased) but they still make up just 0.1% of total TV advertising.

The number of 30 second ads, however, has dramatically increased, from 3.7 million in 2002 to nearly 19 million in 2012, from 44.7% of all TV ads to 50.9%.

The idea that 30 second TV ads are dead is as ludicrous as saying all TV ads should be 30 seconds long. Advertisers create the ad they need to do the job they want to do. Broadcasters are pretty flexible about this; Hovis’s original ‘Go On lad’ famously was 122 seconds long. In fact, if there’s any trend around time-length it would be that many of the most successful TV ads – the ones that people want to share and talk about and which deliver amazing business results – are longer than 30 seconds: John Lewis, The Guardian’s 3 Little Pigs, Virgin Atlantic, C4’s Superhumans, 3’s dancing pony all spring to mind. Cadbury’s had plenty of people complaining when they started to run the cut-downs of Gorilla and so reverted to running more 90 seconds.

But effectiveness is, as ever, key here. All the major effectiveness studies of recent years – the most recent is Binet and Field’s ‘Advertising Effectiveness: the long and short of it’ – have shown TV advertising getting more effective over time as the number of 30 second ads has grown.

If we want to start a campaign about TV advertising let’s not make it about time-lengths but about quality. I hope Trevor will join me in wishing an end to bad and boring ads, however long they are. Maybe we could all start with TV sponsorship break bumpers (lots of 5 second units in there).

I don’t buy the ‘tapas’ premise; people are prepared to devote considerable time – 3 hour films, entire box sets and doorstep novels – if it is merited. TV is more flexible and less prescriptive than ever. If you want tapas one day, you can have it. If you want six-courses with matching wines the next, it is there for you. You decide.

‘It’s good to talk’, Bob Hoskins used to say in TV ads for BT. Well, if it was good then, it’s bloody marvellous now. We have probably never ‘talked’ more in the widest sense of the word. As technology has expanded, so have our means to talk. So the chatter on pillows, at bars, and over watercoolers that we always did has been supplemented by the chatter we now commit to the internet or via the ‘phones that are rarely more than a thumb’s reach away. Our day-to-day tête-à-têtes and heart-to-hearts don’t have to be conducted eye-to-eye or face-to-face anymore (although at least 90% of brand conversations take place offline).

Talking is unique to humans and there are many reasons we practise it: to seduce, to impress, to complain, to insult, to suggest, to warn, to avoid having to talk to someone else who is in the room and whom we don’t like or have made a drunken mistake with. And new research by Data2Decisions, commissioned by us, has examined a very specific subject that we seem to enjoy talking about: brands.

Brands are no shrinking violets; they want to be talked about. Every brand wants to become a household name, a readily accessible linguistic touchpoint that gets used in conversation – ‘it does what it says on the tin’, ‘simples’, the future’s bright’, ‘calm down, dear’. Few people actually start a conversation desperately wanting to talk about brands except lanyarded delegates at marketing conferences or the seriously weird. But brands do enter and enrich our conversation with ease; they are a normal part of our day-to-day discourse, part of the grammar of modern speech.

The research – called ‘POETIC’ (‘Paid, Owned, Earned: TV’s Influence Calculated’) – examined what things brands do that lead to people talking about them – that is, in addition to the heritage, market and seasonal factors which make up an ongoing level of talk which involves brands (some of which will have been influenced by previous brand activity of course – like my Bob Hoskins quote above).

POETIC examined over half a million data points for 36 brands across three of the biggest brand categories – retail, finance, and drink – including data from word of mouth specialists Keller Fay, YouGov’s Brand Index, social media monitor Brandwatch, and data directly from brands.

I won’t rehearse all the findings here – if you want an overview, please visit here, or you can watch it presented by D2D here (you’ll need to register if you haven’t already). But the main finding was that, in the categories the research looked at, paid-for advertising was responsible for driving three quarters (72%) of all the new conversations about brands (TV advertising was behind the majority of this). The rest of the new – or incremental – conversations were generated by PR activity, events, brand news or changes to products or services.

In recent years there has been a fair amount of talk in the ad industry about the power of word of mouth, especially because of the readily accessed and highly visible chat that takes place online. But we shouldn’t confuse where the conversation takes place with what actually caused it; we don’t credit the pillow, bar or watercooler, yet some do seem to think that Facebook makes all the conversations that take place on it happen.

It is true that getting a brand talked about adds sales and profit to a brand (some brand conversation will inevitably be negative from time to time, of course, so brands need to create a big store of positive chat and goodwill first to balance it). What is clear from the research is that conversations about brands don’t just appear out of thin air; brands have to pay for people to say.

In the ‘80s film ‘Groundhog Day’, Bill Murray wakes each day to discover that he is trapped in time and place, doomed to relive the same events over and over again. Love and understanding save him in the end.

I am reminded of this because TV suffers from its own form of Groundhog Day; every so often something happens which leads to headlines about a revolution in TV viewing or the end of TV as we know it or farewell to the schedule. Often the word ‘death’ is unleashed like a rabid, half-witted groundhog – even now, when the death of TV died so long ago.

In the last week, three such events happened (well, two and half maybe): the BBC released new iPlayer figures (they were up, unsurprisingly ); Netflix announced it was remaking seminal TV series House of Cards and making the entire series available to its subscribers all in one go (bit like a straight to DVD box set available to a limited audience); and a broadband advice website did an online survey where a third of its sample claimed to prefer watching TV on a tablet rather than a TV set, as if they would ever have to choose. And, just, as if.

This was a perfect storm in a teacup of coincidence and it has led some to a kind of perverse, blind triangulation, the result of which was a perceived threat to linear TV. More VOD is being watched? Must be bad news for linear TV. An on-demand subscription service has invested in quality TV content? Must be the thin end of the wedge for ad-funded TV channels. The sorts of people who take part in online surveys claim they like tablets? Must be…well, actually, most people dismissed the research for the rubbish it was without blinking.

If we sensibly discount the survey and focus on the two more interesting developments, what do they actually tell us about TV’s future? The iPlayer figures tell us that broadcaster VOD services are growing. This is great news for the broadcasters and for Thinkbox. Linear viewing is stable at 4 hours a day and VOD is growing. TV as a whole is expanding.

Netflix investing in its own exclusive TV content is great too – and I’m sure it won’t be that long before it considers selling the content to a broadcaster who will schedule it. I’m looking forward to Kevin Spacey reprising the Francis Urquhart role, and Netflix is contributing a bit more quality TV content to this golden age we’re enjoying.   No surprise that they are not attempting to launch a brand new series mind.  As Foster’s found out with Alan Partridge, it’s a much easier job remaking online TV when the property chosen was first made famous and popular on linear TV, than launching something from scratch.

But Netflix – or YouTube, for that matter – investing  in their own TV content is a sign of them joining the TV industry, not trying to shatter it.   It proves that exclusive quality content is what motivates people to try new services.  And exclusive quality content doesn’t come cheap.  Netflix is reported to have spent £65m for the rights and production of one series of House of Cards, which rather puts YouTube’s $100m into perspective.  As TV expands, so do the means by which we can choose to watch it.  From the licence-funded BBC, to ad-funded commercial broadcasters, to on-demand monthly subscription services, to micro-payments to watch individual shows on-demand – how TV is funded and watched is a mixed, but balanced ecology. The main dividing line, if you really need one, is the two main ways to watch: on-demand and linear. And it is worth rehearsing one more time why they co-exist and complement each other.

Linear and on-demand TV fulfil different viewer needs: we watch linear TV to share the live experience with others and, sometimes, because we don’t know what we want to watch and can’t motivate ourselves to search for something. The schedules are expertly and lovingly curated for us and remain the trusted first port of call. We watch on-demand to fit all our TV into our busy lives and to catch-up when we’ve missed things. Linear is convivial, VOD is convenient, and together they are increasing the amount of TV people are watching. Neither is a threat to the other; it is a relationship built on love and understanding. The sooner everyone appreciates that, the sooner we can stop reliving the same day.

Almost exactly a year ago, Netflix boss Reed Hastings joined many a failed prognosticator before him and predicted the end for ‘traditional TV’. Consumer behaviour was supposed to inevitably change thanks in part to his company and its on-demand wares. Who needs linear when you’ve got on-demand?

Well, it turns out pretty much everyone.

As we pointed out a year ago, he was aiming at the wrong target. We said that it wouldn’t be linear TV that the likes of Netflix could ‘disrupt’ but more likely competitor on-demand subscription services like Lovefilm and the DVD rental industry.

So, here we are a year on and what has happened? Well, Netflix and Lovefilm have both wisely invested in major TV advertising campaigns to encourage subscriptions. Linear TV viewing has stayed remarkably stable at the 4 hours a day mark (something we anticipate will be borne out shortly when we get the full year viewing figures for 2012 from BARB). Broadcaster VOD services like ITV Player and 4OD have continued to innovate and grow rapidly, complementing linear TV. And Blockbusters has gone into administration.

I don’t want to see anything go into administration – except perhaps Page 3. It is very sad that such an established high street brand has hit the rocks. Many’s the hour I have spent wandering its aisles looking for something to babysit my children (in Crouch End it is known as ‘Ocbusters’ due to some missing letters). But its demise is not all that surprising given the effect online commerce is having on the high street. Blockbuster’s difficulties – and to a certain extent HMV’s as well – are in part due to the likes of Netflix and Lovefilm.

So Mr Hastings’ prediction that Netflix would end something might be coming true, it just isn’t linear TV that is ending. And it isn’t a case of ‘not yet’ either. On-demand services have not dented linear viewing because most people mostly prefer watching live TV at the same time as others, to be in the moment. As on-demand services become increasingly available on connected TVs, some linear viewing may be displaced but we’ll be watching more TV in total (and Thinkbox has no preference for linear or on-demand; both create commercial revenue) and the linear schedule will remain the dominant influence on what on-demand we feel like watching. Whatever Netflix does, on-demand is a net gain for TV.

Maybe you’re not all such big fans of musical theatre as we are at Thinkbox, so I’d better tell you that the quote above is the title of a song from My Fair Lady, in which the ruthlessly rational Professor Higgins bemoans Eliza Doolittle’s absurd need for emotional expression.  It’s one of those annoying generalisations akin to Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus; annoying because it provokes a flash of recognition.

It’s a fact that males are about four times more likely to sit along the autism spectrum than females.  Autism is not a disease that needs to be cured; it is a condition that confers special qualities on people, many of them highly prized – and increasingly so in a world of dynamic technologies.  Check out your IT department; it’s likely that the majority will be male, many with a passion for the Lord of the Rings and playing World of Warcraft.

A friend of mine has a son with Asperger’s. When he was smaller, he had an elaborate ritual for arranging all his cuddly toys on his bed; if the crocodile was not to the left of the panda, the monkey to the right of the lamb etc. he would become very unhappy and agitated.  He now often asks “What’s your favourite  X?”  Putting things in order, into organised structures and hierarchies, is clearly the predominant way his brain makes sense of the world.

The reason I bring this up is that the trend of second-screening is now making some people ask “which is the first and which the second screen?”  The technology lobby has long been in a supremacy race with other media (and TV in particular), a race that only they are running.  This, combined with journalists’ need for winners and losers, has led to some ugly telly-bashing over the last decade that I’m relieved we are seeing less of.  But the topic of two-screening seems to have piqued a return to form; the suggestion that a tablet or smartphone might be a ‘second screen’ seems to offend some technologists and they argue that in fact the smaller personal screen is the one getting more attention and more action and hence should be the one called the ‘first screen’.

This misses the point on many levels:

1) Anything where you have to decode squiggles in order to read it is going to require more visual focus.
2) We know from many sources that attention is neither necessary nor indeed desirable when it comes to advertising effectiveness.
3) Our research ‘Screen Life: the view from the sofa’ revealed many things including the fact that there are often more than two screens involved, and that most concurrent screen activities are not inter-related but that when they are TV is the single biggest catalyst of interaction.

On that basis, I think it’s fair to say that TV probably could lay claim to being the first screen, in chronology if nothing else, but in fact Thinkbox is now avoiding the whole unpleasantness by calling it ‘multi-screening’.

But the wider issue of an obsession with hierarchy goes further than just multi-screening.  Maybe people who come from the binary tech world can’t help but see things in a pecking order, whereas those of us who come with more of a content sensibility are drawn to rich variety, contrasting characters, and magical combinations. It’s no surprise that so many of us at Thinkbox love musical theatre.  I hope we at Thinkbox pay full respect to search and social media, to radio and to direct mail, as they all work wonderfully alongside TV advertising; fertile unions of different advertising techniques. When internet fundamentalists wish death on TV I hope they know what they are wishing for; internet and mobile media would work very much less well without it.

The obvious answer to Professor Higgins’ question is that if women were more like men the human race would eventually die out.  Fretting about whether men or women are better could lead to extinction.

Any regular reader of this blog will know two things: that our Research Director receives the occasional threatening wedgie, and that Thinkbox’s love for Twitter knows few bounds – and not just because of the divine Bruce.  Twitter recently held an event called ‘Twitter TV’ at which they invited Thinkbox to speak.  At the event, Bruce Daisley proclaimed that ‘Twitter loves TV and TV loves Twitter’ (might have been the other way round but you get the point; it was a love-in).

The mutual respect is real and all around the world TV companies and Twitter are having grown-up conversations about working together.  Thinkbox has been promoting the benefits of social media for TV and TV advertising for some time; TV provides lots of the inspiration for social media which in turn amplify TV. Our research study, ‘Screen Life: the view from the sofa‘, examined the multi-screening phenomenon and the implications for TV programmes and advertising, which were overwhelmingly positive (it’s won some awards too, which we’re sickeningly boastful about).

From Question Time to Loose Women, TV producers are busy encouraging viewers to respond via social media to shows, and TV advertisers are also getting into the habit. Serious time is then devoted to analysing the volume and, crucially, the sentiment of tweets and other social media comments. Broadcasters are encouraging TV producers to present their ideas for how interaction – via a dedicated a companion app or via generic 2nd screen apps like Shazam and Zeebox – might enhance the viewers’ satisfaction at the time of the initial format presentation.  Social media is encouraging some people to watch more live TV, in order to be part of the conversation, and sometimes comments and recommendations on social media can encourage people to tune to a certain programme live or watch later on-demand.

That all sounds tickety-boo. Wonderful even.  So you might wonder what on earth the miserable old Cassandra at Thinkbox has found to fret about now.

Well, our genuine enthusiasm has always been tempered by some caution that we should not get too seduced by the easily countable data that social media provide.  We need to keep this in perspective.  I repeat this again now because it has just been announced that Twitter and Nielsen in the US have teamed up to launch the ‘Nielsen Twitter TV Rating’.

Their very bold press release describes it as ‘the definitive reach metric for social TV audience measurement and analytics’; says it is ‘the first-ever measurement of the total audience for social TV activity – both those participating in the conversation and those who were exposed to the activity – providing the precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming’; and that it aims to ‘help broadcasters and advertisers create truly social TV experiences’.

So here are five questions to ask yourselves:

1) What will Nielsen be measuring:  potential reach or actual reach?
2) What % of the viewing audience is commenting via Twitter?  Our research suggests typically less than 1%.  Many times more comments are being made face to face on sofas across the land but we choose to ignore those.  And 50% of tweets come from 0.5% of Tweeters, so hardly representative
3) Why does this matter for TV advertising?  Some clever chaps, Ben Ayers from Blinkbox and Paul Frampton from MPG Media Contacts, have suggested that an audience armed with their smartphone etc. ready to tweet might also respond more instantly to TV advertising.  If response is what you want then that’s obviously good.  If immersion is what you need, then maybe not.
4) What might be the effect on commissioning?  If the market starts valuing more highly the advertising in them, there might be a move towards the genres of TV that generate the most buzz, relative to their viewers.  So perhaps we’ll see more live, more participation, more sport, more scandal and shock (all of which are important of course in their place, but seem to promote relatively more tweets).  Maybe we’ll see less serious drama, current affairs, science…
5) Is ‘engagement’ a helpful word to use?  It suggests a programme that people are absorbed in, interested in or moved by.  Often, those are the reasons people are commenting, but not always.  Anyone who follows tweets during Eurovision will know that it isn’t always enjoyment/approval that is being expressed.  Without sentiment analysis, counting Tweets has limited value.

So, forgive me, but please tweet this with some caution. I don’t mean to knock the stuffing out of this new initiative, and I’m not saying it is a turkey, but I just think we should all take stocking of what it actually means. Merry Christmas!

Last week I attended a stat-packed presentation by Oliver & Ohlbaum on the future of TV. As it is Christmas and a time for giving generously, here are some of those stats, gift-wrapped and placed beneath the Christmas tree of advertising knowledge.

Before I stat you up I, I’ll point out that, as usual, the O&O event was a fantastic use of time, full of genuine, impartial insight, and I would urge you to clamour to get to their future events.

O&O were full of cheer for the future of TV – and not only in the UK, but globally too. They highlighted TV’s ‘robust’ position within the display advertising market and predicted ‘slow but steady growth’ for TV ad revenues (their forecast went as far as 2017). This is fair enough and Thinkbox will be announcing the figures for UK commercial TV revenue in 2012 early next year. They’ll have to go some to improve on 2011’s record-breaking high of £4.3 billion – and some forecasts predict a small drop from the record high – but we’ll have to wait and see. Let’s not count our chickens before we carve our turkeys.

O&O looked at the prospects for TV in a connected world and the implications for on demand TV. They anticipate digital TV recorders becoming almost ubiquitous by 2017 (currently around half of UK homes have one), which we know is usually good news for advertisers as people tend to watch more TV and more ads when they increase their ability to control what they watch.

They also predict that, in 2017, linear viewing will ‘remain dominant’ but on-demand viewing, which has been additive to linear TV so far, is likely to ‘displace a small amount of linear viewing’.

This chimes with what we’ve been saying for some time. We’ve jumped the gun a few times in recent years when we’ve said linear TV viewing would stop growing only to see it continue. However, I think that when we analyse the full year viewing for 2012 we will finally see linear’s recent growth spurt settle and perhaps even dip. However the key point, that O&O’s analysis also shows, is that overall we’ll be watching more TV.

Currently, according to O&O, 43% of the UK multi-screen a week (IPA Touchpoints data has this at 50%). O&O see this increasing in the next five years to reach 62% of the population, driven by increased tablet ownership, which they predict will reach 68%. Our Screen Life research looked at multi-screening in detail (we put CCTV in people’s living rooms and then analysed the footage) and discovered that multi-screening brings a host of benefits to advertisers: it keeps viewers present for ad breaks, encourages more TV viewing, does not affect ad recognition, brings people closer to TV and its ads, and it appears to encourage more shared and family TV viewing. Multi-screeners are also more open, welcoming and positive about advertising than single-screeners.

So plenty of positive stats to mull over over the mulled wine.

I know that when you all think of the 17 December 1996, you inevitably think of the 14 Peruvian guerrillas from the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement who on that day took hundreds of people hostage at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima.

However something else happened that day: the United Nations passed Resolution 51/205 and proclaimed today (21 November) World Television Day.

I’m embarrassed to say that this fact has only recently come to our attention, so I’m guessing it must be news to you too.  Why did the UN decide the world needed a Television Day? Well, in its own words:

‘In recognition of the increasing impact television has on decision-making by bringing world attention to conflicts and threats to peace and security and its potential role in sharpening the focus on other major issues, including economic and social issues, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 21 November as World Television Day…World Television Day is not so much a celebration of the tool, but rather the philosophy which it represents. Television represents a symbol for communication and globalization in the contemporary world.’

Thinkbox often talks about ‘the increasing impact television has on decision-making’, but more in terms of how effective TV advertising is rather than how it brings global attention to major issues and thus brings the world closer together. But as we watch the events in Gaza unfold – or witness the regime change in China and the regime non-change in America – it is timely to remember the wider social benefits of TV for keeping us in the know.

But TV’s ability to do social good as well as commercial good is not restricted solely to bringing issues to everyone’s attention. Earlier this year, Thinkbox sponsored a Debating Group debate where the motion was ‘Government advertising saves the country money’. The motion was conclusively carried  – but then the audience was people in advertising, so hardly surprising. The main thrust of the argument was that the government investing in, say, stopping people smoking saves  lives, which is a good in itself,  but it also saves the NHS a substantial amount of money in the long run because they have to treat fewer smoking related illnesses. There are endless examples like this.

Nor are TV’s social influence and commercial influence mutually exclusive. For instance, put crudely, investment in TV advertising leads to the most increased profit, which leads to more jobs, which leads to economic growth.  The taxes on the extra profit (a few international companies notwithstanding) and on the extra jobs help pay for schools, roads and hospitals.   And, of course, investment in TV advertising also helps pay for those TV programmes that bring issues to our attention to be made. Advertising is where commercial interests can happily sit with enlightened philanthropy. These themes were touched on at our ‘TV: doing good’ event, which looked at the host of ways TV can make our lives better, including how commercial brands can enhance their profits while also making a positive social impact. You can watch the event on-demand here.

So happy World Television Day.  I’m sorry we’ve done little to celebrate it other than this blog but they are a bit more organized about it in Europe; here is their special website with greetings from people such as Usain Bolt, Kofi Annan and Sir Martin Sorrell where they articulate what is so special about TV.  Lets  all take the opportunity to reflect on what an incredible cultural contribution TV in all its forms makes,  informing and entertaining everyone – even Peruvian guerillas.