Is it the viewer or advertisers TV is putting first, asks Youi marketing boss
The head of insurance brand Youi has challenged TV networks to think about the experience they provide to viewers and work out whether it is them or the advertisers who are their primary customers.
Schreuder: Is TV paying enough attention to the viewer experience?
Speaking on a marketing panel at the Rethink TV event yesterday Hugo Schreuder told a room of network executives and ad buyers: “This might be a little bit controversial. For everyone in business we keep on challenging ourselves in putting the customer first and doing the right thing for the customer all the time.
“I sometimes wonder looking at TV networks who is the customer they are putting first? Is it us as the advertisers, which we appreciate, or is it the person sitting there watching the content they are producing? Because I think the content is brilliant but I sometimes do think that the experience is not that great. How do you fix that? I don’t know.”
Speaking with Mumbrella after the event ThinkTV chairman and Network Ten executive Russel Howcroft described it as “somewhat of a chicken or egg discussion”.
“Of course they are serving both. Commercial TV exists for commerce and for entertainment as well. If you’re not entertaining and you haven’t got the audience then you haven’t got anything to sell. It’s somewhat of a chicken and egg discussion really.
“Having said that let’s understand that we’re in the commercial TV business and it’s our role in life to help people that advertise be more successful, and that’s what ThinkTV is about, to help advertisers get the most out of TV. And in return the TV stations have to make sure they’ve got the audiences. You can’t answer that question in a black and white fashion as both are vital to the business.”
Asked whether the volume of ads shown during prime time was sustainable, Howcroft replied: “Of course it is. If we discover that the volume of advertising is causing us a decline in audiences we would look at that. And I think the public understand they are watching commercial television and they understand the contract, and when did we last talk about the contract? They know they are getting $20m of shiny floor show for free, and they know part of that is watching the ads.”
He also pointed to research in which people said they appreciated advertising.
‘Be part artist, part scientist. The industry is getting too obsessed with data as the only point’ #ReThinkTV @Think_TV #JoePollard pic.twitter.com/LzF6Rjwqgt
— Emily Murch (@Emilymurch) November 30, 2016
During the same panel Telstra CMO, Joe Pollard, called for TV networks to “re-engineer” its sales models to work out how they sell across both the main screen and their digital platforms.
“I think there’s got to be a realisation that television networks are content companies that produce great content that is funded in a lot of instances by ad dollars that needs to be distributed on as many platforms as possible so advertisers like us can get aggregated eyeballs,” she said.
“I think in a world of disruption that has happened with the digital players the way TV is viewed in the commercial model, including the length of the ad breaks, has not changed.
“We know from, Telstra TV that the aggregated viewership of the catch up services on Telstra TV is bigger than, say, Netflix and Youtube but I have to buy all that secondarily. I don’t think the model of how you aggregate those models and serve them up to us is right, it needs to be re-engineered.”
Founder of Seven Network-backed tech platform, AirTasker, Tim Fung, told the room TV should work harder to give more context to advertisers around the exact content of the programming their messages were going out in, saying the context is “powerful” for the brands.
topics
Hugo Schreuder
joe Pollard
Marketing
Rethink TV
Russel Howcroft
Telstra
ThinkTV
Tim Fung
Youi
It tickles me to death when these folk get together and slap each other on the back and congratulate themselves on their making of “great content”. Don’t they listen to the unwashed masses?
It ISN’T great content in the main, it’s mostly crap on commercial TV!
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Free to air television networks – all the commercials at least – put themselves first. The advertisers and certainly the punters who watch this dross are left to look after themselves. Nothing runs on the time, shows disappear from one week to the next replaced by replays – anyone for yet another overdose of Bad Bang BS or Two and A Half-Wit Men? Every ad break is topped and tailed with blaring promos for more of their own crud, usually some done to death “reality” rubbish, while news, sports and weather updates, plainly recorded hours before, provide another reason to put your foot through the screen, or turn to the ABC or SBS for at least some relief.
Commercial TV is going the same way as newspapers – its night-to-night audiences are down hundreds of thousands compared to only a few years ago. Yet these blokes sit around at some mutual admiration gabfest telling themselves how good it’s all going. Thank god for streaming or even the good ol’ DVD renter down the corner.
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I think Russell is being a bit disingenuous in claiming the viewer is happy with the current deal …
Issues of program quality aside, the ‘user experience’ for the TV viewer has deteriorated substantially over the past couple of decades, as the amount of ‘non-program’ time has steadily increased.
In the sixties and seventies – arguably the heyday of commercial TV – advertising was limited to seven/eight minutes per hour. This was typically made up of four commercial breaks of two minutes each and filled by four thirty second commercials. Programs were preceded and followed by a break, with one in the middle. It was simple, it was not overly disruptive to watching the program, and it worked for both viewers and advertisers.
Contrast that with the current scheduling of twenty plus minutes per hour ‘non-program’ time. Paid advertising makes up a substantial chunk of that (roughly double the old amount), but piled on top of that is a mass of clutter from the station itself – all the station promos (i.e. unpaid ads for its other programs), news updates, weather updates, lotto results and anything else the station’s programmers can think of, crammed into overly-frequent breaks that totally disrupt the very thing the viewer is there to watch.
Worse still for the paying advertiser – they used to be the sole hero of the commercial break, but now they’re forced to compete for the viewer’s attention with a plethora of (unpaid) ads for the station itself. I wouldn’t be too happy about this, if I was the one funding the whole shebang.
I could also argue that too many impressions reduces the effectiveness of all of them. After the next break you watch, stop and try to recall everything you’ve just seen – I’ll bet you can’t. (There are simply too many, so your memory resets to zero).
Because they’ve got too greedy, the TV networks risk killing the goose that has laid their golden eggs for the past fifty years.
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I totally Agree that “TV networks risk killing the goose that has laid the Golden Egg for the past 50 years” Average programming, advertorial style news items, advert/promo saturation. Channel 7 even have the audacity to have MKR promos for on air dates in Feb!! If that is not padding out the promos and killing the viewers nothing will.
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How many viewers did Think TV invite for a free lunch this week?
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