tv advertising’s golden years
TV is slumping. Majorly. Read any business publication that covers media, and they’ll point to TV and newspapers and say something like “it’s like watching the titanic sink… in slow motion.”
TV is suffering a bit more noisily that newspapers. The ‘papers at least have subscription revenue to keep them propped upright as they offload passengers. DVR is tearing a giant gash in the hull of the HMS Boobtube.
The problem seems simple: people don’t like to watch commercials. For the most part, they’d watch their favorite show either slightly delayed, or entirely off schedule if they can skip watching/waiting for commercials, rather than watch it live in realtime, suffering through the breaks and irritating, repetitious commercials.
This explanation (my own) is a little counter-intuitive. If Americans are notorious for media-related ADD, then why would they want to watch their shows uninterrupted and in bigger continuous blocks? To explain this to myself (yes, kind of schizophrenic) I think it’s not that people want to watch TV the way they watch movies in a theater, I think it’s that they *don’t* want to see the same commercial 9, 10, 11 times every hour while they watch their show. Add to that the ability to pause the show when they want, and you’ve got the reason DVR is the threat to TV that it is.
In an effort to get people to watch commercials (it’s what pays for that brand new episode of Grey’s Anatomy, after all), networks are trying to find new-and-creative ways of shoving products down viewers’ throats. My9 has this brilliant idea, which is really not a new idea. It’s even got a cute durrogatory name: infotainment. I’ve got news for them… nobody is going to be fooled.
The closest thing to infotainment people will watch is Queer Eye or some similar home show on the DIY network where sponsors pay to have their products used in an episode. The ratio of info / tainment is very heavy on the tainment, and offers the info as a supplement. Only a few products get mentioned over the course of the episode, and usually once in each episode, which gives each a wider marketing stance.
Now how can this help riveting TV drama like my favorite The Closer, or fun/silly half hour must-see-tv Thursday shows? Product placement has a way of sticking out like a sourball on a sirloin steak in these shows. Consumers see it and immediately get turned off.
So, let me bring this all back together. Assumptions: Viewers hate being forced to see commercials they’ve already seen (unless they’re amazingly good, in which case they can go to youtube to watch them over and over). Viewers don’t mind pauses in their shows. Infotainment is for Cher and Sally Struthers. Product placement works in instructional shows, but not in works of fiction.
I’m no TV exec, but as a TV consumer, I think that I’d be much more likely to watch a commercial break or two under the following conditions:
- I have never seen the commercials before
- The commercials were of a higher quality
- the commercials were fewer in number
If I were smart like Henry Blodget, I would do a little research and draw you a nice table and make some assertions about how much advertisers would have to pay for it to work out financially for the network. But I’m not Henry. Maybe he’ll read this and run with it, I’ll let you know.
Based solely on the fact that I’m asking advertisers to produce *more* varied, original commercial content, I’m sure it’s more expensive. But maybe they’d be willing to invest that money in the commercial content and buy one 90-second spot at a higher rate during the sweeps episode of a primetime show if they could be certain it would get them more actual eyeballs. ‘Cause it’s all about conversion, right?
The proof is in the puddin. And the puddin is made once a year: the Superbowl. Anyone can tell you that most viewers of the Superbowl watch the commercials as vigilantly as they watch some of the action. Advertisers build up to their spots with ad campaigns (yes, ads about ads). Products debut there. Brands make their mark there.
If that model has proven to work, why can’t they scale it down for first-run episodes of popular shows? Instead of releasing their “good” commercials on youtube right away, encourage people to DVR shows and play it back. I don’t eat Burger King, but their “chicken with more kick” commercial cracked me up so bad, I couldn’t get enough.
So, TV ad sales people, here’s the one liner: quality over quantity. Make it work.