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At an industry conference last year, executive chairman of Clemenger Group, Robert Morgan, said "there's an entire generation of advertising people who have never been inside a television studio". It was not a comment relating to the need for advertising people to see TV being made, it was about how they have become disconnected from the medium.
I called Robert and invited people from Clemenger Melbourne into The Project studio at Ten. Many accepted the invitation which then led to a number of agencies coming in for a quick tour and a 45 minute chat. So far, staff from McCann, Leo Burnett, DDB, CHE Proximity, Cummins&Partners, GPY&R, Whybin\TBWA and BWM have visited.
This has reinforced the point Robert was making. The disconnect of creative agencies from the media industry has not been a good thing. A history of well-known and understood facts about the commercial power of TV have been lost. And this loss within the foundations and knowledge banks of agencies can only lead to less than optimum outcomes for clients.
These days the debate about TV advertising in most agencies is left to a strategic discussion or a creative debate. The client and agency discussion around the commercial power of TV is less likely to involve hard facts about its reach and power to generate sales, demand and long-term brand development. So, we use our 45 minutes with the agencies to provide facts about television. These have resonated strongly with participants and have,
I firmly hope, given the agencies some tools for their television arguments which go beyond a discussion about the creative merits of different media.
Each day 15 million Aussies watch TV, and 85 hours of broadcast content is watched on TV each month compared with three hours on a tablet and four hours on a phone. More time spent with a medium equals more opportunity to hit with your message. Nothing comes close in time consumed.
A Deloitte survey informs us that TV is still Australians’ preferred source of entertainment, that ads continue to be of value to advertisers in spite of, and perhaps because of, the increasingly fragmented media landscape, and that TV has the greatest influence on buying decisions.
There are things that are said to be bad news for TV like passive viewing and multi-screening, but these are great for advertising. It means the TV is always on in the background, which is a great opportunity for excellent advertising to cut through, while multi-screening gives another opportunity for great cut-through, turning TV into a direct response medium. In the UK, the marketplace has consumed these irrefutable facts and agencies have come flooding back to TV.
I explained to another agency this week that I am thinking about putting ‘TV Salesman’ on my business card. But there is a nuance to this. I am a salesman for the commercial power of TV advertising. Why? Because I know it works.
By Russel Howcroft.
Executive general manager at Melbourne at Network Ten.