Television's Catch-22: Tough Choices For TV, Easy Choices For Advertisers

[Commentary] 2012 promises to be the most tumultuous year ever in TV media buying as digital video gives advertisers more choices and TV networks more competition. More than 40% of the total advertising expenditures in the United States are focused on traditional television. Can the TV industry delay the full impact of digital video?

It’s time for marketers to break free of the peculiar and self-defeating rules of TV advertising and make smart investments into digital video ad formats on a genre-by-genre basis. The rule of TV advertising says that you must use television to maximize reach, frequency, recall and impact. If you break this rule, you are insane. But if you are sane, you spend your advertising dollars in a way that maximizes the return on investment. Doing so would mean shifting the vast majority of your advertising dollars to measurable video display media, which means you’ve broken the rule of TV, which means you are insane. In order to grow profits, TV executives must convince brands to pay for advertising ahead of a TV show’s actual airing, while guaranteeing stars enormous paydays ahead of ad revenue. The only way brands can justify paying ahead of time is to believe rule. As if to take their cue from"Catch-22 ," the brands obey the rule, and the absence of statistical evidence provides for its own enforcement.

[Wood is vice president, digital media and analytics, iCrossing]