TV Ads Becoming Less Effective

The fall of television advertisement effectiveness would seem to be common sense with the proliferation of digital video recorders.  A survey released today by the National Association of Advertisers in conjunction with Forrester Research details that most marketers believe television marketing is becoming less and less effective.

 Over 50 percent of those surveyed reported that once DVR penetration reaches 50% they would cut television advertising by at least twelve percent on average.  To date Digital Video Recorders are reportedly in about 25% of all homes.   Approximately one in four respondents believe their current agency is poorly equipped to handle the changes in TV advertising.

 Most stunning of all the numbers – 62% of those surveyed believe television advertisements are less effective than in previous years.  Many indicated a desire to explore new options within existing media channels.   We tend to think one of the larger problems isn’t that advertisements are inherently less effective than they were years ago but that the quality of the advertisements overall is inferior.   Really how many good commercials are there on television these days that are different?   Many are outright obnoxious, loud, crude or otherwise offensive to large groups of people.

 Then we have the incredibly successful advertisements run by Apple for their iPhone.   These have to be some of the simplest but catch commercials in ages.   Literally they are just demonstrations of the actual device with a catchy song.   A few months ago they released the iPhone with a song from a barely know singer from Canada.  A few months later the song is a hit and the iPhone continues the long string of Apple successes.  Everyone knows their commercials and they continue to be on the cutting edge.  In many ways their modern commercials are equivalent in impact to the hammer throwing Olympian from the 1980s. 

So many of our current commercials are largely useless – drug commercials for medications large percentages of the target market will never require.  While typing this blog I sat through two commercials for a herpes medication when most reports indicate approximately 12% of Americans have it.   Add that to the redundant cable and satellite TV commercials and automobile commercials and what you have is very little in the way of originality.

 If marketers want to see a more responsive audience they need to take a closer look at the commercials they are producing.   It is only then that they will once again captivate an audience and increase effectiveness.