All TV is video, but not all video is TV

There is no doubt that total viewing of video, in all its guises, is rapidly growing – but it doesn’t make sense to rob the most effective form to pay for the others, argues Lindsey Clay, chief executive, Thinkbox.

My colleague Neil ‘Morty’ Mortensen recently stopped talking about Liverpool long enough to bury his face in a mountain of data. He did this in order to arrive at an estimate for the total time spent watching ‘video’ in the UK across all the many screens we now have. He drew on figures from BARB, ComScore, Route, IMDB, Rentrak, FAME, DCM, TV broadcasters and made some educated estimates for out of home screens (pubs, underground stations, dentists…).

We wanted to get an idea of the average person’s video consumption and the figure he arrived at was five hours a day. This is the average across the whole UK adult population (it includes non-users of these different forms of video).

Here is how it breaks down:

We’ve tried to be as exhaustive as possible, but let us know if you can help make it more accurate. The driving reason for doing this is because people kept asking us to do it as it didn’t exist elsewhere; they wanted to know where TV sat in the ever-expanding world of video. And we love making charts, obvs.

It shows there are many different forms of video around which to advertise and that to talk about them as though they are all the same is patently foolish. There are vast differences in the ways people experience them and gulfs in both the quality of the video and the contexts they offer advertisers.

Some are audio-visual, some just visual. Some are audio-visual but often experienced without the sound on. Some are watched mainly on small screens, some are on giant screens. Some feature professionally made and expensive content, some are home-made.

So, for example, linear TV is three quarters of the total video time and ‘Adult’ video is a staggering half of all non-TV online video time. I don’t think I’m being prejudiced, despite the enormous Thinkbox-branded axe I’m wielding, when I say TV is the more attractive prospect for the vast majority of brands.

This is a point Claire Enders made at a conference recently, when she pointed out that a lot of ‘online video’ – from the BBC iPlayer to pornography and the nether regions of online video aggregators – is not much use to advertisers. So increased online activity is potentially bad news for advertisers because many of the places people spend much of their online time are not great environments for advertising.

Obviously, when online environments are high quality and trusted – and there are plenty of those – then this is great news for advertisers, especially if they integrate it with TV. But there is a limited amount of premium space and an infinite amount of the rest.

As with everything in advertising, effectiveness is all. I won’t bang on about it, and I hope you already know anyway, but TV is repeatedly proven to create more sales and profit pound for pound than anything else (most recently in Payback 4 by Ebiquity).

Nothing comes close in terms of effectiveness. Dominic Mills wrote about this for MediaTel’s Newsline just this week. Yet still we hear calls for advertisers to shift money from broadcast TV to online video – although this is largely ignored, as TV ad revenue is increasing year on year.

There is no doubt that total viewing of video in all its guises is rapidly growing. With robust TV viewing at the centre, you can watch video of all flavours wherever and whenever you like. But surely this is a reason for the total ‘TV and video’ budget to increase dramatically in line with increasing viewing rather than the broadcast TV budget being used to fund online video.

It doesn’t make sense to rob the most effective form of video to pay for other forms. Let’s find the money from elsewhere.

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