So McKinsey has released a study, profiled in a front page article in AdAge this week, quantifying the decreasing return on investment from TV advertising. They claim that in 4 years TV will be only one third as effective a medium as it was in 1990. And they observe that in the last 10 years, TV viewership has decreased almost 50%, while rates have increased 40% (these are all US figures) - not a good combination of figures.
The problem is while everyone knows the system is broken, no one has figured out a good model for doing things any other way. We still don't know how PVRs and alternative distribution platforms (iPods, PSPs) will change viewership. The internet is still a bit of a wild west, changing rapidly and regularly (YouTube is only 18 months old) and most companies are still experimenting with how to do and measure things in that space. Ambient/guerrila stuff is the subject of much debate. But we all know how to create and measure and buy mass media like TV, so the machine keeps on chugging along.
The thing that really gets me, though, is that this study actually gets it kind of wrong. Studies like this one from McKinsey are talking about the average of all advertising on the TV medium, without distinguishing about the quality of individual creative (or the quality of individual programming for that matter). Yes, TV has decreasing returns overall, but lots of campaigns still get noticed and enjoyed and discussed - the good ones, the ones that provide entertainment or emotion or cultural currency. It's like saying that the movie box office is declining every year - it may be, but there are still lots of huge blockbuster movies.
McKinsey's study isn't really about effectiveness, and they misuse that word. It's about the efficiency of spending dollars to buy media time on TV - today you get less for your dollar. But how effective the creative placed in that time is a different issue. The medium and the message are two different variables, and treating all TV advertising as the same misses that crucial point. Television - and the medium of film overall - is still (when done well) probably the fastest, most powerful way to communicate a message, meaning and emotion. Other media do important things that TV can't, like interactivity or community, but it's really hard to pack the same amount of meaning and storytelling into a sports sponsorship, an event, or a website as you can in a piece of branded film.
Gareth over at Brand New (another fantastic blog worth following, by the way) has a couple of great posts on this topic the last few days where he says all this better and more succinctly than I have.
McKinsey's study isn't really about effectiveness, and they misuse that word.
Posted by: scottsdale medical marijuana | July 11, 2011 at 09:07 AM