ITV Research Claims TV Is The Most Powerful Medium

ITV has unveiled research which it claims proves that TV is the most powerful communications medium.

The study, which was conducted by Manchester University’s professor of psychology, Geoffrey Beattie, shows that the brain finds audio visual images easier to process than either text or audio alone.

Beattie exposed participants to messages about three products, a holiday, a car and a mobile phone, via an audio visual message, an audio message and a text message. He found that throughout the trials, recall and retention of information from the audio visual message were significantly stronger than that from audio or text.

The study found that viewers who had a single exposure to an audio visual message had up to 166% better product recall than when exposed to an audio or text message. The results also showed that the other media would never catch up to the communication advantage delivered by the audio visual message.

Commenting on the findings, ITV’s marketing director, Jim Hytner, said: “I believe this is the most important piece of ad hoc research that ITV has ever undertaken. The results show how TV is received worldwide and prove just how important television is. This is ITV delivering on our promise to produce more evidence on the power of our medium.”

Beattie added: “The brain simply likes telly. Even I am surprised at how powerful television has proved to be.”

The PPA’s recently published Absorbing Media Report suggests that television adverts are more annoying than any other kind, with more than half of all respondents who watch TV saying that they often find TV ads irritating (see TV Advertising Most Annoying, Says PPA Research).

ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.com

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