Three factors that make TV critical to effectiveness

Attention, emotional clout, and trust are the critical elements of what makes TV effective, says Peter Field in a new report exploring the enduring business impact of television advertising.

Why TV (still) matters

TV remains a constant of effective advertising, and, increasingly, of profitable companies. “I would argue that any marketer who considers walking away from TV advertising would be crazy to do so,” writes Field. 

The reason, he explains, is that TV excels at long-term demand growth through brand building. According to the IPA data studied, TV has remained remarkably consistent, with between 80%-85% of effective cases deploying TV.

What is it?

Field’s new report, commissioned by the TV industry body Thinkbox, is based on the last 10 years of the IPA Effectiveness databank alongside data from attention studies by Amplified Intelligence, Lumen, System1 and The Australian Effies. 

Unsurprisingly, just as TV advertising had been a key channel in the effectiveness campaigns that made up the seminal findings in The Long and the Short of It, this new study observes many similar trends that even suggest that TV is becoming more important in an increasingly fragmented, distrustful digital era. 

Critical factors

Attention and mental availability

Some media are better at holding attention and imprinting memories (mental availability) than others.

Most (85%) online ads fail to meet the 2.5 second threshold at which they start to impact memory, according to research from professor Karen Nelson-Field, and when they do gain attention it decays quickly. TV, by comparison, tends to deliver much more stable levels of visual attention throughout an ad. 

Not only is the attention much more stable, TV delivers a lot more of it: on average over 15 seconds of attention for 30-second TV ads and 9.1 seconds for 15-second ads, with BVoD (Broadcaster Video on Demand) not far behind, according to Lumen data. It’s worth noting that YouTube’s unskippable ads also do a similar task of building mental availability.

Field’s conclusion, then, is that based on CPMs weighted by attention, “TV advertising suddenly starts to look rather good value.” 

Emotional clout

Emotion makes your media budget work much harder and more efficiently: 3.5x harder than rational messaging. If you want to make an audience feel something, TV tends to be a good way to do it. 

“If you want to reap the benefits of powerful emotional advertising on attention and therefore long-term growth, you must use high attention media,” says Field. 

Trust

Similar to Field’s earlier work on trust in advertising and its importance to profit, media choice is vital. Partly, it’s down to the fact that certain prestige media (especially regulated media like TV) play on the strengthening relationship between trust and perceived quality. 

With high trust building effects, TV’s impact on profit has been growing (see chart). “The clear implication is that marketers should be very careful to choose trusted media, because trust is a big issue for growth and profitability,” he says.

How much TV to use? 

“If we take the broadest view of effectiveness across all of the six business metrics – some of which are more short term, some more long term – it suggests that the sweet spot for TV is about 45% of the overall budget,” Field writes. 

But an important idea in this report is the importance of an advertiser’s ability to influence pricing power and, therefore, the ability to maintain or even grow margins/profitability.

“Looking through the prism of pricing power therefore suggests an even greater use of TV advertising – perhaps something approaching even 80% of the overall budget,” adds the effectiveness guru. However, with profit growth as the key objective, Field observes a budget mix closer to 50% dedicated to TV.

Sourced from ThinkBox/Peter Field. Image: Thinkbox/Peter Field