Let’s ditch the acronyms: a new language for Total TV
Opinion
There are two types of TV advertising: mass and addressable. That’s it. Let’s ditch the unhelpful acronyms and adopt this straightforward framework, argues Thinkbox CSO Elliott Millard.
Media used to be simple. Four advertising channels, clear boundaries, and media planning you could explain over lunch.
Since 2005, we’ve added five hours of daily media consumption and more than doubled the number of media channels available to advertisers. At the heart of this has been the proliferation of video as it expanded everywhere.
Posters added video. Podcasts added video. Radio added video. Social platforms became video-first. Every channel has scrambled to become a video channel.
Even TV added more video, which meant new names. In TV, we now swim in an alphabet soup of different, overlapping labels – linear, broadcast, BVOD, AVOD, SVOD, CTV, FAST….
This is a problem. We’re not swimming, we’re drowning.
We have created artificial silos that serve nobody, least of all our clients’ business goals or consumers’ actual experience. No one sits down to watch BVOD or CTV. They sit down to watch TV.
We’ve made the simple complicated and made our own lives harder.
YouTube claims Greenland?
TV’s edges have become muddied by multiple definitions. Symptoms of this self-imposed identity crisis include YouTube claiming it is TV and the tedious debate around it.
Claiming something doesn’t make it true. It’s like claiming you own Greenland when you don’t; just saying it over and over doesn’t change reality.
TV has a clear reality. It actually means something specific to the people who matter: advertisers and viewers. It also means something specific to the regulator, Ofcom, which explicitly states that YouTube is not TV (it is a VSP or video-sharing platform).
For advertisers, TV, the medium, means professionally produced content and advertising, all of which are regulated, independently measured, and pre-verified by humans. It also means you rub shoulders with other advertisers who want to meet those standards.
For viewers, all those advertiser benefits boil down to one thing: trust.
Consumers understand the difference between TV and YouTube, and they have wildly different levels of trust for them. New trust research by Tapestry found TV was twice as trusted as YouTube. Credos found similar for TV compared with social/influencers.
TV has higher trust than any other channel, in fact. That trust transfers to the brand’s advertising there, and trust drives profit.
YouTube, social video, and other unregulated online platforms don’t meet this standard. They’re valuable in their own right, but they’re not TV.
A new language for Total TV
We need to move on from the chaotic, unhelpful language that has grown like ivy around TV. We need to embrace the concept of Total TV.
Total TV includes what we currently call linear, BVOD, AVOD, SVOD, etc. – and that content when delivered on other platforms like YouTube, for example.
Viewers will just call it TV, but in advertising, Total TV is available in two specific buying modes: mass and addressable.
* Mass (one to many) – reaching mass audiences efficiently, building fame and cultural presence at scale.
* Addressable (one to one) – targeting specific audiences, households or individuals with precision.
That’s it. Not twenty acronyms. Not separate teams with separate planning processes and separate measurement frameworks. Two modes, one environment.
I won’t pretend this is going to be easy. Not everyone on the buy or sell side – TV companies included – is currently set up like this. But it is the journey we must take.
The beauty of this framework is that both buying modes exist across Total TV. You can buy linear addressably. You can buy BVOD as a broadcast reach extension. The format doesn’t determine the buying mode. Your business objective does.
Not all addressable is equal
When you buy addressable on social platforms or programmatic video, you get razor-sharp targeting in scroll-past environments with lower trust and smaller screens.
When you buy addressable TV, you get razor-sharp targeting in the most trusted advertising environment, on the biggest screen in the home, during professionally-produced content that people have actively chosen to watch.
The viewer doesn’t know or care that your ad was served addressably. They just know they saw your brand during content they enjoy and trust, and that trust transfers. You get TV’s creative canvas, TV’s trust premium, and TV’s effectiveness – with digital’s targeting precision.
You get, in short, the best of both worlds.
Change the language now
The shift to addressable TV is accelerating. By 2030, three-quarters of commercial TV viewing will be addressable. But our industry consultation shows that confusion around terminology and siloed agency structures are preventing advertisers from realising the potential of addressable TV.
That’s only true if you’re still thinking in channel silos. When you think in Total TV terms, addressable becomes what it should be: a buying mode that combines TV’s trusted environment and creative canvas with digital’s targeting precision.
Total TV delivers the ROI and the trust. With addressable, you now get broad reach AND precision targeting within that same trusted environment.
Consumers already see it as one thing. Advertisers want to plan it as one thing. It’s time we caught up.
Elliott Millard is Thinkbox’s chief strategy officer.