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.”
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!
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.
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.
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.
How many viewers did Think TV invite for a free lunch this week?