Author, Blogger, Digital Marketing Evangelist

TV is dead! TV is dead! TV is dead?

July 23, 2014

Who's watching live TV?
Pretty much everyone, all the time!

It is sexy to believe TV is dying. Cable cords are being cut; Netflix has killed traditional TV, etc. etc. It is considered the word of God that Shout Advertising is dead, digital rocks, Conversation Marketing is da bomb.

All of the above is kind of right, but you'll be surprised at small that right is. Look at the chart below, no matter what he dimension TV never drops under 71%. Seventy. One. Percent! Male or Female. Young or old. High or low income.


We are not only watching pretty much all the TV content being aired, we are watching it on more devices and more of the time.
Yes, digital disruption is winning in small pockets. Yes, new ways of marketing and advertising and proving their worth. But both things are happening much, much, much slower than you might imagine. They continue to be (heartbreakingly) tiny parts of large company budgets (just10% for GM, http://goo.gl/dA3lik). The chart above explains why.

So what?
Make sure that at the highest level your media strategy is solving for And and not Or. TV and radio and Google and Email and x and y and z. It is silly to ask: "Should we do TV or digital?" "Should we invest in Facebook or advertise on TV?"
In the long run people and companies that get good at And will rule the world. People and companies that continue to have Or strategies will survive, for a lot longer than you and I might anticipate.
I'm going to make a controversial point now.
If you are a large company and you can only make Or decisions (that would be awful), choose TV. For the conceivable duration of your career, you might still have a more positive impact on your career (first!) and your business (second!).

I'm sure this is surprising coming from a Digital Marketing Evangelist, and the person who passionately advocates for Utility Marketing, for Owning audiences rather than Renting them. [Six glorious marketing Venn diagrams.] But it is important to keep reality in mind. Everything I champion and advocate works, it will get more and more important over time, but for now my recommendation is that it is a part of an And strategy and not Or.

Good luck! Long live TV! : )

Data source, along with many other helpful links to many other content consumption studies: http://goo.gl/JG1tEq
Photo: creative commons licensed (BY-NC-ND) flickr photo by nrtphotos