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.

‘Research’ is in danger of losing its point. It has become a much abused term these days; days when a few (albeit well-intentioned) questions can be tossed at a small, random sample of wholly unrepresentative people and then their answers offered up as evidence of something significant. For such significance, you may as well hang around the stage door at a Westlife concert and ask those clutching autograph books who their favourite band is. It isn’t going to be the Wu Tang Clan, worthy of our respect though they are.

So we get things like this on the usually wonderful Brand Republic. Half a dozen people in the street are asked their views about DTRs and then those views are published as fact, complete with apocalyptic headline. We responded to the article with the facts and yet, still, people who should know much better come along, dismiss the facts and say that, because it doesn’t ring bells with their own lives, it can’t be true for others. A little blinkered?

I’m all for opinion, but it has to be informed. That’s one of the driving ambitions behind Televisionaries; to arm everyone with the (proven, reliable) facts and then let them loose to argue about the future. Reckless and misleading research shouldn’t be acceptable for any topic, but in an area like this it is criminal because a) people’s claimed behaviour isn’t reliable and, more importantly, b) there’s no need to ask them anyway because we already have regularly updated, hard, reliable, robust data available from the likes of BARB (data from 1,100 homes with a DTR), panels like Sky View (data from over 7,000 homes with Sky+), and studies like the one conducted by London Business School (which observed and recorded thousands of commercial viewing occasions). They all show how viewers actually use their DTR’s, with real time monitoring of large numbers of people who are selected to be representative of the general population. When rigorous research exists to tell us something that doesn’t necessarily tally with our own experience, should we really just ignore it and go looking for evidence to feed our preconceptions, no matter how ropey or unreliable?