Now is the time to capitalize on television advertising. GETTY
Alan Wolk |Source: www.forbes.com, March 2020
Back in the day when I first started working in television advertising, there was the now quaint notion that brand building was something that advertisers should actively be engaged in, that they should be looking to increase the long term value of their brand rather than just win some short term victories.
The campaigns that people most wanted to work on were those brand campaigns, the ones (Nike’s “Just Do It” being the most famous) that were designed to create a strong emotional response rather than a logical one.
The ones that people still remember fondly twenty, even forty years later.
I’m afraid though that decades of digital advertising, where the emphasis is on click through and making an immediate sale, coupled with the rise of DTC brands (whose goal is also to sell product immediately) have blinded brands to the value of long-term brand building.
How else to explain the pullback from spending money on advertising at a time when more people than ever are in front of a TV. (Inscape, which tracks data from over 14 million opted-in VIZIO smart TVs, reported that OTT viewing was up 10% as of a week ago, while linear viewers also watched 10% more TV overall—and that’s last week. This week the numbers are likely to be even higher.)
