TV advertising is (not) dead

 Many people started hypothesizing a few years ago that the increasing investment in advertising via social media was leaving TV advertising out of the game. It is no surprise that companies are increasing the amount of time and investment on online and mobile advertising and will continue to do so, but has this traditional tool of advertising really lost its value?

Source: Marketingcharts.com
Generated by: Shullman Research Center

Research conducted recently shows that TV advertising is influential and advertisers get many benefits from it. I will refer here to the main advantages of TV advertising that companies are using to generate profit.  

One reason is that good way to attract new customers. The latest studies show that 67% increase in household purchasing comes from customers that are new to a certain brand or a product category, while online advertising helps generating more profit from existing customers. This results can be explained with the fact that people normally avoid ads of different products offered via social media, so they do not disrupt their online experience. While, people tend to watch TV ads since watching TV is a more passive activity.  

Moreover, the study conducted by Shullman Research Center shows that TV advertising is still the best way to effectively reach adult consumers. In this context, it is also a tool for companies to reach luxury buyers. The same study provides data that demonstrate that TV advertising tops the list of Ad channel rankings for this category of consumers not only in terms of the large reach, but also because of the positive feedback companies get in terms of product purchasing.

The chart below, produced by Marketingcharts.com, reflects the data analysis since 2009 and includes forecasts of coming years until 2017. TV ads seem to have a consistent spending growth rate until 2016. As for 2017, the predictions are not very optimistic. PricewaterhouseCoopers forecast suggests that advertising spending will increase in general, but thus will not be the case for TV advertising. 

Until now, advertisers are trying to get the best of both worlds since TV advertising, being the most influential traditional form of advertising and digital advertising are evaluated as complements of each other. Most probably the balance will change in the near future, but for the moment TV advertising is still alive and advertisers are trying to get the most of it while it is still an influential tool.