Will TV ever lose its relevance?
Martin Galvin, director of agency sales at Specific Media, on why he thinks TV is the sun in the screen solar system – every other device orbits around it and needs its warmth to survive…
Three if not four stone ago, I was forced to watch Mel Gibson’s 1992 epic ‘Forever Young’, in which a test pilot from 1939 asks to be frozen for a year only to wake up in 1992. To cut a long story short the world had gone ‘Batshit’, but the old values eventually prevailed. I’ve saved you a couple of hours there.
I was reminded of this feast as I read the annual Deloitte / GfK study of 4,000 consumers released a few weeks ago. As usual it threw up some interesting findings, not least that over half of those surveyed ranked TV advertising as having the greatest impact on purchasing decisions of any media, causing the authors to conclude that ‘the UK’s willingness to consume adverts… and advertisers’ continued eagerness to invest billions in TV advertising… perplexes many commentators (who) regard the traditional 30 second TV spot as fundamentally broken. Deloitte’s view… is that the traditional TV advertising model is neither broken nor breaking’.
Headline #1 – TV isn’t broken
On continued reading however, the report struck a note of caution for the TV market of the future, noting that the number of people aged 19 to 24 who have ranked TV as the most influential fell 13 points year on year to 56%, from 69% in 2011.
Headline #2 – Younger folk behave differently, because they adopt new technology that changes how they’re hardwired
Because advertising operated for years on the notion of a good idea broadcast to a certain demographic, we can still get hung up on demographics. We look at age groups, social classes, gender etc, and we dice them up to sell them whatever we want to sell them. But clearly our behaviour changes as we get older, and we enter a different demographic.
When I was a kid, Fox probably showed me an ad during ‘The A-Team’ on ITV in order to get me to bug my Mum to take me to the cinema to see ‘The Return of the Jedi’. Now I guess the strategy around Christmas, in order to get me to buy the Star Wars box set for my kids, would be wildly different – I don’t really watch ITV these days, I have more choice. However, I do still watch a load of TV, albeit live, time-shifted, on-demand, on different types of screen, and certainly across more than two commercial channels.
So in this respect the points of influence I adopted as a kid shaped the way I behave many years later, but I just interact with it differently. Similarly the way these young people behave today will shape the way they behave many years down the line. In this respect we are all forever young, only it’s 1992 and not 1939.
Let’s look at that Deloitte report again, and the note of caution for the TV market years from now. While it’s dropped 13 points, the majority of people still say TV has the biggest impact on what they buy. All the ‘TV is Dead’ headlines get a bit tiresome – no it isn’t, it’s in rude health. TV is however, different to how it was and a new generation are growing up with a different relationship to it. TV is the sun in the screen solar system – every other device orbits around it and needs its warmth to survive.
Video content on other devices in the vast majority of cases evolved on TV. However, we can do fun, engaging, commercially persuasive things with that content on PCs, mobiles and tablets that we can’t when it’s spawned in the corner of the lounge.
In summary therefore, the notion that the TV model is broken, and that the medium itself will no longer be relevant as we change our behaviour, is at best madness.
My son could unlock and navigate my iPhone before he could walk, but I can still stick him on the sofa in front of Toy Story ‘on the big tele’ and buy myself 90 minutes.
When he’s older he’ll probably tweet about it while watching it. When he’s older still, he may well see some brilliant video advertising that has him gagging for the release of Toy Story 9, but he’s still going to orbit the sun – meaning that our adversarial way of looking at other media just feels weirder than ever.
As someone not working in TV (yet), let’s applaud the fact that TV is in rude health, grudgingly pay the Sky subscription, and get on with doing brilliant work that complements it.