Televisionaries

At Televisionaries last week, Channel 4’s Andy Duncan chose to begin his excellent speech by revealing to everyone in the room – and everyone watching on the web – that he had been given a sheet of guidelines by me on words and phrases that we prefer and some to avoid if possible . How embarrassing, you might think, being outed as a control freak, to everyone’s vast amusement. But I stand by my desire to ask everyone to unite behind some common language. Here’s why…

The guidelines were intended as a means of helping our audience through the often arcane jargon of the TV industry. Media isn’t the centre of the universe for advertisers, quite reasonably, and they can do without trying to work out whether traditional, linear, regular, normal, established, conventional or broadcast TV are the same thing or not. Most wouldn’t know what VoD was and might guess it was a distant planet in Star Trek. IPTV, online TV, broadband TV and web TV… erm… help!

The visionaries on our stage were all given exactly the same advice because we’ve recognised a need for much greater consistency in the language the TV world uses. We need to make it more easily understandable so we wanted our visionaries to share the same lexicon.

One good example of how language needs to be accurate, and a particular bête noire round these parts, is how the word ‘digital’ is used. I always have to ask people what they mean? Do they mean digital broadcasting or do they mean the internet? Given that most major media already have significant digital elements – TV will be 100 per cent digitally broadcast by 2012 – digital is an increasingly meaningless and unhelpful word. If you mean the internet why not say internet or online. That’s what consumers would say. In fact normal people would never use the word digital to mean the internet, though they might use it to describe their new camera or telly. If you mean internet plus mobile plus gaming plus computing then I can offer interactive media as a better phrase, though why wouldn’t you use the more specific word? In my opinion, even ‘the internet’ is a bit broad and unspecific when talking about media planning; do you mean search or email marketing or website development or banners etc?

Another reason we made our suggestions was to minimise jargon. We’re not big fans of jargon at Thinkbox because we prefer, when we can, to use the words and phrases that viewers use; they should be the people we keep at the centre of our focus. We’re trying (with difficulty) to wean ourselves off the industry acronym PVR because it makes little sense to ordinary people. DTR (digital television recorder) makes more sense because it records digital TV and you’ll find that’s what retailers call them. It’s a very good pointer to how viewers think about things. Mind you, most of them just call their DTR Sky+, or its equivalent.

So, there you have it: a teeny-tiny little bit control-freaky maybe, but all done with the best of intentions.

We’re all set for the big event tomorrow. Having seen most of the presentations and new research I’m confident it’s going to be great.

One topic recurs in many contributions, and that’s fragmentation. In the past, lower individual ratings for programmes were associated with off-peak content and restricted coverage. But, as a couple of speakers will point out, that’s just not the case any more. Here’s why.

Firstly, multi-channel offerings have added thematic or ‘passion’ channels to TV’s range. Whether you’re nuts about sport, natural history, arthouse film, news or food you can find them on TV at any time these days. The viewing to those programmes is as engaged and rewarding as any other appointment-to-view TV. They also offer highly targeted audiences to advertisers that in any other medium would be highly valued.

Secondly, the TV companies are actively investing in new platforms that are likely to ‘fragment’ the audience further and they are doing this to enhance the viewing experience. The ability watch your favourite TV on a +1 channel, from a digital TV recorder, via IPTV or from a web service is making TV more pleasurable for viewers but it is encouraging the total audience to access TV at different times, and that is often portrayed as a regrettable thing. However, programmes are seen by just as many people – more in many instances – as in the past. Channel 4 have many examples where a programme, Shameless for example, now reaches many more people in a short space of time via all its broadcast channels and on-demand platforms than it ever did just from one primary broadcast. So there’s no cultural fragmentation going on; the fragmentation is purely about access.

All on-demand TV is ‘appointment-to-view’ by definition. Convincing advertisers and agencies that this sort of ‘fragmentation’ is actually making their TV advertising more powerful is top of our to-do list and worthy of some thoughtful debate tomorrow.

So, thank God, we’re nearly there! Tomorrow we will congregate in a former church and, unlike church, we’ll debate rather than just listen. One final thought is this piece in the Observer last weekend which sets the event nicely in context. Yes, media are enduring a pretty shit time, but an apocalypse it is not. More to the point for us, TV has a very positive future; one that we’re looking forward to exploring tomorrow.

This is your last chance to raise any more issues you’d like us to cover. Fire away.

Massive congratulations to all the worthy winners at last nights IPA Effectiveness Awards, and in particular to the collective geniuses at BBH for scooping the Grand Prix and the Effectiveness Company of the Year award. God knows how big a mantelpiece they have in their building as they have to find room for both those special awards as well as two other Gold awards, a Silver and a Bronze. It should be a very happy Nick Gill who takes to the stage at Televisionaries.

We sponsor the IPA Effectiveness Awards for many reasons, but the main one is that word Effectiveness. Right now nothing is more needed than cast iron proof of the return on marketing investment. It’s a cause central to Thinkbox’s efforts and we couldn’t be more proud to be the sponsor of the awards.

We are also proud on behalf of TV. It once again proved its peerless effectiveness, dominating the award winners by appearing at the heart of 22 of the 23 winning campaigns (press was in 19, outdoor in 15, online in 14, PR in 13, DM in 9, and cinema in 6). It underlined the findings from the research Les Binet did with Peter Field in their book Marketing in the Era of Accountability. They examined 27 years worth of IPA case studies and found that campaigns involving TV are 25 per cent more effective than those without.

But also of interest (and lest we bang our TV drum too hard) is that it is not just TV on its own that creates effectiveness. Clearly TV needs to be at the heart of the most successful ad campaigns, but if the IPA Awards show us anything they show us the importance of an integrated approach. The average number of media channels used by winning entries was 6. It is TV plus other media that works best, not it or anything else in isolation. We’ll address TV’s evolving relationship with other media at Televisionaries I’m sure, but what do people think? How will integration develop in the future?