Before you start reading, click on the link below and a chart should open up. (Any problems send me a mail.)
Download ads_as_good_as_progs.ppt
The chart you’ve just looked at was drawn from the TGI and makes a point I’ve been blathering on about, with depressing regularity, for several years now. The commercials we, the UK ad industry, are making have been getting worse* every year, for the last 16 years.
This is one definition of ‘worse’. Of course not all advertising works by being liked. Experience suggests however, that it’s a fair predictor… see 'The Advertised Mind' by du Plessis for evidence.
In case you read it, the recent article in Marketing (‘Annoying but engaging’ 01.3.07) was typically simplistic twaddle, failing to understand the longer-term and broader implications of irritating advertising. One of which goes like this…
The decline in advertising liking wouldn’t matter so much in a world of 3 or 4 TV channels and remote that’s lost behind the sofa. But when people have hours of television stored on a Sky+ hard drive and are adept at manipulating that programming with a handset that my cat could use, we have issues.
Once again I’m indebted to Richard Huntington, here for some scary data; data that’s made all the more terrifying by virtue if being out of date already…
“Number of Sky+ PVRs in the UK - 1.7m out of 8m subscribers. Sky estimate for the penetration of PVR type devices in the UK by 2010 - 34%. Amount of TV watched off the disk in PVR households - 40-60% (UK and US data). Amount of ads zapped when watching off the disk - 92% (Forrester data).”
Apart from slinging advertising in and becoming a sugar beet farmer, what suggestions do you have to prevent the collapse of the advertising industry (and free-to-air commercial TV by the way)?
*Quite often some smarty-pants will point out that this is a relative statement and that it might be the case that ad liking has stayed constant, while the quality of the programmes has improved. If you're of that persuasion, I urge you to watch the show that tempted Noel Edmonds back to our screens - Channel 4's 'Deal or no deal'.
