The Changing Face Of TV Advertising

Here’s a TV ad for ‘Cravendale Milk’ that someone, somewhere uploaded to Youtube:

Cravendale Last Glass Ad

I’d never seen it before (I no longer have a television), but I noticed a reference to it on the Wieden + Kennedy London blog and sought it out as a result. This is a funny time in adland. The internet is simultaneously opening up new opportunities & threatening to close many doors.

1. Suddenly your audience is the world.

Many brands use different campaigns in different countries, and brands mean different things to different audiences. Other than language barriers, the web begins to flatten this out. Suddenly your French ad is being seen by French Canadians. This is fine for the time being, but what happens when the French start trying to claim credit for your Canadian product sales?

2. You’re instantly trackable

TV ads are tough to track. You can get figures on how big the audience is at a particular time (usually extrapolated from a small group of TV viewers who agree to have their habits monitored by computer). But how many are just using the TV as background? How many are in another room? How many actually pay any direct attention to ads any more?

Put a 40-second ad onto something like Youtube, and you can see exactly how many people actively clicked the ‘Play’ button, how many found the ad in the first place, how quickly it spread, how well it was rated and - something that was just unthinkable before - feedback direct from the ad’s viewers. Needless to say, this is terrible for mediocre ads (and mediocre agencies) & can offer a potential boost for smaller, more relevant ads/agencies that just wouldn’t have made it through before.

3. The system is far more complex

Let’s say you’re launching a new flavour of coke. 10 years ago you could just blitz TV and you’d easily cover your entire audience within a few weeks - whether they were interested in the content of your ad or not. Today, there’s a whole chunk of your audience that never watches TV, that never reads a magazine. You (or in the case of 99% of big brands - your agency) have to work much, much harder to reach that same audience - and it’s not just about money any more (though money still gives you a huge headstart). And it’s much more democratic - if they don’t like your ad, you don’t get through. If they hate your product, you just don’t get through.

4. Your competition is much tougher

On TV, your competitors (aside from the kettle & the garden) are other channels. Most channels synchronise their ad breaks so, on a micro level, your ad doesn’t have much competition aside from other ads. On the internet, your competition is immense: every other page on the internet (or at least every other regular site your audience visits). Unlike the inertia of the TV channel, visitors are very happy to hit the back button or any of the dozen links on the page taking them elsewhere.

On a macro level, your competitors on TV are other brands (or other agencies if you’re an ad creator). On the internet, your competitors are other brands and - crucially - ‘amateurs’. Amateur is a nice word - it comes from Latin roots and means literally ‘for the love’. It’s tough to compete with an army of competitors who are creating ‘for the love’ of what they do. Their knowledge & enthusiasm can build instant rapport with viewers, they think about their particular niche far more often & far more deeply than the average ad professional, they have a network of friends to support them.

5. Ads are forced to be ‘more than ads’

Ads are forced to be ‘more than ads’. As quality rises, viewers are actually seeking them out, a new medium is born. ‘The Dove Ad‘ (also known as ‘evolution’) is probably the standard bearer for this point. Search for it on Youtube and you’ll see there are 7 or 8 instances with a combined total views (remember these are active viewers - not just people with the TV on in the background) approaching 10-million. Even the parodies are in the hundreds-of-thousands-of-viewers range. A quick google blog search shows around 5000 mentions of ‘dove evolution’ and the supporting website (’the campaign for real beauty’) has over 30,000 backlinks according to Yahoo. That’s not bad for a full global brand campaign that cost less than some newspaper ads.