‘Stats, Lies and Videotape’
Raymond Snoddy on the enduring power of television that leapt out of a study by Deloitte Research.
Ask television executives what is the ratio of time people spend on social networks compared with watching television and you get a wide variety of answers.
Some think the ratio is probably one to one. Others give television a better deal but few if any get even close to the correct answer.
The growth in use of social networks is of course massive. After all Facebook now claims one billion subscribers and social networking sites now reach 82% of the world’s online population.
In fact, in the UK in a recent month people spent an extraordinary 178 million hours on Facebook, a further two million hours on Twitter and one million on LinkedIn.
Very impressive until you look at consumption levels for television. The Brits watched 6,399 million hours of television in a month giving a ratio of 36 to one in favour of the box in the corner. Across Europe two billion hours of television are watched every day.
The ratio was one of a series of numbers demonstrating the enduring power of television that leapt out of a presentation by Paul Lee, global director of Deloitte Research, called ‘Stats, Lies and Videotape’.
It was distilled from a series of research projects, including an online survey of 4,000 on their viewing habits and interviews with more than 200 executives and investors. Everywhere you looked a consistent answer came back – in favour of television.
The evidence shows most people just like TV. It helps them relax after a hard day at work and TV also facilitates another human desire – helping to bring family and friends together. Second and even third screening is more about discussing the programme with others than interacting with it but such discussions tend to enhance the programme brand rather than detract from it.
Naturally TV is likely to have an even greater physical presence in future as we buy larger and larger sets.
Use of pure video on demand services remains low and although the vast majority in the UK have heard of YouTube, LoveFilm and Netflix only YouTube really cuts the mustard when it comes to usage. Two out of five say they have used YouTube at least once in a month, 10% LoveFilm and around 5% for Netflix. All the others fade to small numbers.
In the UK free-to-air public service families of channels command over 73% of total viewing and even with PVR recordings three quarters of sport, news, reality TV and soaps are watched within 24 hours. According to Sky, even in PVR homes 80% of viewing is still live and even during fast forwarding if an ad has been seen before at normal speed, there is a recognition factor.
And by the way despite all the growing competition, television’s share of the total advertising cake has remained constant over the past decade at around 35% across Europe. Despite the presence of the BBC, UK viewers are forecast to watch nearly a trillion ads this year. Enough facts already. You get the general picture by now.
But how can you chair a debate – as I had to do – with television executives, about such numbers with everyone tumbling over each other to agree and barely a word of dissent from the audience. Even from their different perspectives, Mai Fyfield, group director strategy at BSkyB, Bal Samra, commercial director for the BBC and director of operations for BBC Vision and Tom Toumazis, a former Mecom, Endemol and Disney executive agreed.
There would always be challenges but essentially few would have forecast five years ago just how strongly television would have held on to its audience, its role. Despair. How do you stir up a debate grounded so strongly in agreement and consensus?
For good measure there was Paddy Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Marketing at the London Business School who has been expressing such views for years and wielding the knife on the digerati gurus such as George Guilder. Guilder forecast that network television would be dead by the year 2000 and that the Internet would herald a golden age for newspapers.
Then slowly the penny dropped and the despair lifted. Artificial confrontation may be more fun and journalists are more naturally drawn to heat than light but what we are seeing are more mature debates about the future of television. More facts, less “bollocks” as Professor Barwise put it.
A plateau of understanding has been reached and as a Deloitte executive said privately afterwards, “the company’s research and arguments had initially been contrarian but had eventually become part of the consensus”.
There is however no room for complacency. Everything could change and perhaps we just haven’t noticed yet. Even as the debate – let’s call it a discussion – got underway the latest numbers from the Internet Advertising Bureau were circulating.
UK digital ad spending rose by 12.6% to £2.6 billion in the first half of 2012. Such money has to come from somewhere. The figure includes search which accounts for 59% of revenue but some of the money has probably leeched out, alas from newspaper revenues. Mobile revenue was up by 130% to £181 million.
But what did the Deloitte panellists think about the future?
Mobile was going to get more and more powerful and more viewers would put their toes in the pay TV sector for modest packages – so that they can watch even more television.