The Television Predicament

In the words of Dave Morgan, “Over the past fifteen years, the average reach of national TV campaigns has dropped by 20% and individual spots by 80%, in spite of TV viewing being at an all time high.” Despite many marketers today abandoning the TV for marketing purposes, Dave believes that “Ad reach on TV matters more than ever”. Below are a series of points from his article:

  • A target audience not reached is a potential customer not created
  • The cause of the reach problem is fragmentation compounded by the failure of industry’s tools and practices to keep up.
  • Talking targeting is a red herring.
  • The “network effect” still requires audience exposure.
  • Making up lost reach “off-TV” is expensive and not even close to comparable.
Although Dave argues that companies should continue to find more innovate ways to catch TV target audiences –since TV viewing is at an all time high–I think I would have to agree with the rest of the marketers Dave mentioned about. Despite TV viewing to be increasing, I find that nowadays more and more consumers (especially the younger generation) spend most of their time online – whether it be on their smartphones, laptops, or tablets. I know that many of my friends today have completely abandoned the TV, and moved on to Youtube, and other streaming websites for their daily entertainment. Perhaps for the short term, it may be worthwhile to invest development into better targeting TV watchers. However, for the long-term environment, I believe it is important to follow the youth generation in their consumer behaviour – in other words, the Internet is where the generation today is, and will continue to be.

Source: http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/internet-fix-tv-s-reach-problem/233110/

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