Ad break? Tweet time? Give me a break!
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In years gone by, defending the worth of TV advertising was a simple brief that involved lots of long lunches and the occasional awards ceremony. In the brave new age of digital communications, however, it is no easy feat and much of the credit for the continued strength of TV as an advertising media must go to Tess Alps and her team at Thinkbox.
Late last year Thinkbox even attempted to bridge the divide between the old world and the new with a TV and Mobile event at the Soho Hotel in London. Among the speakers was media visionary Anthony Rose, formerly of BBC iPlayer fame and now co-founder of social viewing site Zeebox.
Among the many points Rose covered during his talk was an observation that because Twitter activity regularly spikes during ad breaks, the very definition of commercial advertising has changed. “They’re not called ad breaks any more,” he said. “They’re called tweet breaks.”
Tweet breaks? You’ll excuse me for a moment while I bite my fist in a Sonny Corleone-style gesture. Rose may well be a visionary when it comes to social media but please God keep him away from the marketing lexicon. ‘Tweet breaks’ wins my award for the biggest pile of bollocks for 2011 (and 2012 if he mentions it again).
To the credit of Thinkbox research chief Neil Mortensen, it was a point he also made in reviewing the event in his blog. While effusive in his praise of Rose’s presentation, Mortensen reminded his audience that Twitter is far from a universal audience activity and suggested that the media industry might need to “balance our collective excitement with some perspective”.
Last week, however, Mortensen was guilty of exactly the same lack of perspective when he blogged a very impressive chart showing five years of digital TV recorder penetration in the UK. It is no surprise that the proportion of British homes with the technology has grown from 5% to 50% over the intervening period.
Interestingly, however, the proportion of programmes watched in time-shift mode (i.e. recorded and watched later) remains flat at 15%.
“Pretty obvious, isn’t it?” concluded Mortensen. Despite the impact of PVRs and DTVs - most people are still watching most of their TV live and therefore also watching, not zipping through, most of the ads.
Er, not so fast. While it’s clear more than 85% of British TV is being watched live, there is still a very big jump to get from that number to the proportion also watching the ads. Uncomfortable as it may be to accept, there is a very important leap to make between watching a chosen programme and staying tuned for the commercial messages that follow it.
Try it at home tonight. Sit back with friends or family and watch what happens when the ads come on. I did it for more than six months with video cameras in homes in the UK and later in Australia for a piece of academic research and the results will come as no surprise to anyone except marketers. Yes, some people do watch the ads. A few might even tweet something. But the vast majority do something entirely different instead.
In our research, the audience did occasionally watch advertising. On average, about 30% of the ads broadcast when a ‘viewer’ was in the room were watched. The rest of the time the audience gratefully used their four precious minutes of free time to talk to partners, mind the kids, do work, read a magazine, visit the toilet, make tea or (in one unexpected moment) make love on the sofa (until one of the pair remembered the cameras).
Unhelpfully, we also observed that as the audience size in many of the living rooms increased, the amount of social interaction also went up, while the number of people who actually watched the ad went down. Bigger programme audiences can often deliver smaller audiences for advertising.
And that’s why only stupid marketers and people who work at Thinkbox call it an ‘ad break’ and really believe that people spend it watching ads. It’s actually a programme break and it is probably the most active part of most people’s day. Rather than watch boring ads for products they don’t care about, people do something more urgent or interesting with the time that they have been allotted.
The people at Thinkbox are guilty of the sin of product orientation. Because they promote ads, they assume that this is what people do with their break time. Like the airline executive who sees a plane rather than a journey or the marketer who sees competitors rather than his customer’s alternatives, the truth can only be glimpsed when we tilt our marketing world on its axis and see things from a consumer’s point of view.
When we do that, we encounter unexpected, complicated and peculiar stuff because the world of the consumer has always been mightily more complex than the little plans and charts we use to devise the strategies aimed at influencing them.
So, I agree that tweet break is a loss of perspective. But calling it an ad break is equally bonkers.
Mark Ritson is an associate professor of marketing, an award winning columnist, and a consultant to some of the world’s biggest brands
Readers' comments (5)
Neil Mortensen | Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:03 pm
Mark, I’m pleased to see you read our blogs! Very flattering.
You raise a valid point, and I wouldn’t disagree that we at Thinkbox can be product oriented. Happy to be so in fact.
We are obliged to give people the facts on TV consumption and ad exposure, but what really matters is that they are proven to work (see Ebiquity’s recent Payback 3 research here http://bit.ly/nhZhuK for the proof). We have never claimed people always sit glued to the ads during the break and readily acknowledge that sometimes people do things other than, or as well as, watch the ads in the break; they always have and always will. Chatting is one of these things (off- and online) – but that’s pretty good for advertisers as people often chat about what they’re watching – programmes and ads.
And you don’t actually have to watch an ad for it to have an effect. I’m sure you are familiar with Dr Robert Heath’s theory of ‘low involvement processing’, which explains how TV is taken in without knowing we are taking it in and filed in our long-term memory without any of the conscious filtering which increases the risk of rejection. This makes it a very effective way of increasing a set of associations around a brand and is well suited to thematic or brand messages that need to be remembered for the long-term.
Some ethnographic research we commissioned was similar to yours. ACB put cameras in living rooms and studied what happened in the break. Across 15,000 exposures, around two thirds (68 per cent) recorded some observable ad-related behaviour. They also found that positive behaviours outnumbered negative by almost two to one (43 per cent compared to 25 per cent).
And audio (or a ‘sonic trigger’ if you like your marketing jargon) is one of TV advertising’s big strengths. Things like music and jingles are a cue for viewers to sing along, whistle, and even dance, which we observed them doing on many occasions. And we saw people stop the DTR and play some ads back at normal speed to watch again though. Thankfully we didn’t capture any love-making on camera – although some overtures were made.
At the heart of the matter is good ad creative. If people like an ad or it compels them, they are more likely to watch it – or stop what else they were doing and watch it or not change the channel (just like a programme really). An ad that is liked is also more likely to be effective – likeability being one of the key indicators of effectiveness (as identified in the IPA’s ‘Marketing in the era of accountability’).
There is also a point to be made about frequency. Ads are rarely on TV once for a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ opportunity. If some breaks don’t ‘get’ you, then others probably will. The fact that we watch so much of our TV ‘live’ makes this more likely.
But, at the end of the day, TV advertising works. It works better than any other form of advertising. So whatever people are doing in the breaks, we’re happy for them to keep doing it.
(I think most people do call it an ‘ad break’ – either that or ‘the break’ or ‘the adverts’. I’ve never heard anyone call it the ‘programme break’.)
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mark ritson | Wed, 18 Jan 2012 1:24 pm
Thanks Neil.
A very fair, extremely informed and data driven response.
Which throws me a bit because I am not really used to this kind of response to a column of mine - more used to threats or personal comments about my appearance.
I still think that your point about it being all about good ad creative is still product oriented. In our research it is very clear that the most important factors in delivering more eyes on screen are based not on content factors like creative but rather context factors like time of day or people in room.
The ideal advertising audience is, at least according to our data, sitting alone, late at night and less than 90 minutes away from going to bed. These are the factors that drive ad watching the most.
In contrast the audience that you least want to go after is sitting with friends, early in the evening, watching a program that is very involving.
Or to put it another way - primetime.
Anyway thinks for the comment - clearly you know way more about this than me and I appreciate both the comments and the debate I hope this stirs up.
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Tess Alps | Wed, 18 Jan 2012 6:32 pm
Absolutely agree about the importance of context. And with TV being watched in so many new contexts we need to understand the difference and the effect on advertising effectiveness. I wouldn't like to predict whether watching TV on-demand alone on a tablet on the way to work on a bus is better than watching at home relaxed with your family watching a 50" HD set. Better for what of course. Something else to put on the list we need to research.
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Ryan Wallman | Thu, 19 Jan 2012 0:00 am
Your candour is refreshing as usual, Mark. And your point about product orientation certainly rings true for me - working in a creative agency, we often find it a challenge to shift our clients from being myopic about their product (or competitors) towards a customer orientation.
However, I'm also interested to know what you make of the 'Twitter orientation' that you allude to. It is my experience that marketers with a personal interest in social media also tend to be evangelistic about it in a professional context (with Twitter being the most prone to inducing religiosity, for some reason). As you note, Twitter is far from ubiquitous, so how does one introduce rationality to the debate?
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mark ritson | Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:26 am
I think the more general point of the article was to highlight product orientation in all its forms. Put simply, we tend to see the world from the perspective of the product we are marketing not from the market we are targeting.
Social media gurus are guilty of it when they portray the world as being completely revolutionised by twitter and the like.
Advertising researchers are guilty of it when they assume the audience does what they do and watches ads.
And I might add that marketing week columnists are guilty of it too - when we read and re-read our columns in great detail and assume our readers will follow suit.
The only antidote - to Ryan's question - is data. Ten minutes in a focus group or five questions in a decent Q're are all it takes to destroy assumptions and reveal true market orientation.
Provided that is, the marketer in question can still listen to the voice of the consumer and not rationalise the "incorrect" finding with some bizarre explanation.
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