I’m a sucker for a good quotation. The best can make a point far more eloquently and concisely than I ever could, which is why I use them in my presentations all the time. Sometimes it may be historical figures – for example Henry Ford’s “a man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time” or Samuel Johnson’s famous quote about advertising overload (written in 1759).
I’ve just returned from Dusseldorf, where I presented the keynote speech at the German broadcasters’ ‘TV Effectiveness Day’ at the hugely impressive Tonhalle. It was my third time presenting at this event, and this was the best of the lot. Everything passed by with a ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ efficiency, the entertainment was first class and the catering alone cost more than most conferences cost to stage in total.
What impressed me most was the attendance. Well over 1,300 attendees, of which almost 1,000 were from media agencies or advertisers. In fact, the number of advertisers alone – around three hundred in total – is more than I’ve seen at a year’s worth of media events in the UK. Read more »
I conducted a piece of brand research a couple of years ago, which dared to raise a question few people in marketing ever ask; “are there any brands out there that you would refuse to buy, at any price?”
The answer, at the time, was an unqualified ‘yes’! It was remarkable how many markets and brands were deemed toxic by consumers, many of them in the services sector. These were spontaneous outpourings of rage – we just gave them time to get it out of their system. There were many numerous examples of poor, almost non-existent customer service, especially at those times when customers are most in need; when the technology goes wrong. Read more »
The top US advertisers have rediscovered their faith in the power of TV advertising – but do their claims of television’s ability to generate payback come from the heart or the head?
Sky has been rightly praised for offering access to its content to non-subscribers via the web BUT it raises questions about how they keep existing subscribers locked in. If it is all about adding value to existing subscribers, will reducing the amount of TV advertising exposure they are subjected to be part of that strategy?
Deloitte’s TMT 2012 predictions are as intriguing as usual and show the beautiful randomness of digital evolution. Data is not always ‘black gold’, addressability needs to be addressed…and mobile TV could be going places…
The predicted transfer from atoms to bits, as described by Nicholas Negroponte, is not going exactly to plan. We still seem to place a value on atoms, whether it be through increasing sales of DVD boxed sets or experiencing music in many ‘analogue’ forms. But then digital/analogue is a binary way of seeing the world…
‘Engagement’ is still one of the most overused words in media. It is a slippery snake of a concept, still without a consensus definition and ‘measured’ in a menagerie of random (and often conflicting) ways. Each medium has a different interpretation of it and those interpretations don’t travel well. We have no accepted view of how it contributes to the bottom line. We know very little about it. But we know one thing; it is not attention. We don’t ‘think about’ engagement. So why does it keep getting pushed that way?
Siegmund Freud studied neuroscience, but became frustrated by the limited explanation the physical brain could provide for the complexities of the human experience. When he proposed, more than a century ago, that “‘most of our mental life operates unconsciously and that consciousness is merely a property of one part of the mind” he was vilified by the scientific community. Yet those two hypotheses, that most of our mental functioning happens at an unconscious level and our conscious brain is relatively unimportant in the wider scheme of things, are readily (and provably) accepted by that same community today.
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There does appear to be a strong relationship between television and outdoor; when used together, they seem to aid advertising effectiveness, by working in a highly complementary way. Certainly, the IPA Databank suggests they work well together, and well over half of the prize winning case studies feature TV as a lead medium and outdoor as a significant support channel. The fact that one dominates our time in the home and the other is eponymous with the time we spend out of home suggests to me that the most basic media segmentation, and the one that is perhaps most relevant to the media consumer, is in or out; whether we are sitting in the relative calm and comfort of our own living rooms, or we are out and about in the big, wide world, getting on with our lives and managing to cut a path through all of the noise and distractions.
I almost expect new research on our media usage to be misleading these days. You know the sort of thing; like asking an online panel how many hours a day/days per week do they claim to do this or that and then concluding that people spend more time online than doing anything else. We’ve had a steady flow of that kind of research from the digital specialists for so long now that I’ve become inured to it, but when the industry regulator – OFCOM – engages in similarly dodgy research, the hackles begin to rise again.
In their latest study of young people’s media use, OFCOM asked a sample of 1700 children (aged 5-15) and their parents a number of questions about how much time they spend with different media channels and how important each one is to them. In particular, they ask a question about which piece of technology they would most miss if it was taken away from them; television, the internet, or their mobile phone. Read more »
Haymarket © 1957 – 2012
