(Harvard Business Review) As consumers are spending most of their waking hours online, it seems they are becoming increasingly numb to conventional digital advertising and engagement. A HubSpot survey found that 57% of participants disliked ads that played before a video and 43% didn’t even watch them. As a result, marketers are looking for a way to cut through the noise.
TV ads are second only to recommendations from friends and family for product discovery in the US, per the report, losing the top spot only in Q4 of last year. However, age-related trends indicate that TV ads will lose ground in the future. While Baby Boomers still discover products and services via TV ads more than any other channel or method, among Gen Z and Millennials, TV ads have dropped to the 5th spot, behind channels including social media, search engines, and online retail sites.
This comes when most advertisers are adding more dollars to digital even though online ad fraud is rampant. The total cost of ad fraud in 2022 is $81 billion, predicted to increase to $100 billion by 2023. This is one reason why advertisers are returning to TV.
According to Harvard Business Review “. In contrast to the historical trend, in August 2021 and February 2022, marketers predicted that traditional advertising spending would increase by 1.4% and 2.9%, respectively.
Consumer-facing companies are leading the shift, with B2C service companies predicting the largest increase in traditional advertising spending (+10.2%), followed by B2C product companies (+4.9%). Further, and somewhat ironically, companies that earn 100% of their sales through the internet are leading this inflection — predicting an 11.7% increase in traditional advertising spending over the next 12 months.
Harvard Business Review
96% of all U.S. households, have at least one television. TV is often the first medium we think of for reaching large amounts of people in a short amount of time. While Teens spend, on average, seven and a half hours a week with TV, the traditional TV audience composition tends to be be older than on other media. It’s a great way to reach Gen Xers and Boomers with disposable income.
Does this mean digital is dead? Hardly.
Digital works best when it’s part of an integrated advertising strategy but marketers need to be aware of the over promises and limitations of digital. Does a soup company really need a website and online ad campaign tointroduce a new product or is TV better? The answer will determine your success but those who said that TV advertising was dead were wrong.
