Why do we celebrate the niche and the speciality more than we do the big and the mass? Think about it. All research shows that Americans watch a huge amount of TV and advertisers pay a premium to reach them while they are watching the Super Bowl or 24. The biggest grossers are the most popular films — Avataar and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince topped the charts last year. Across the world, radio operators make more money playing popular music than any other content genre.
As media options increase, time remains finite. So, audiences fragment. They spend more time doing their own thing on the mobile, online or on an iPad, or doing things on all of them at the same time. This has prompted almost all analysts to predict the death of mass media for over a decade now. Yet the fact remains that the more splintering there is, the higher is the premium that advertisers will pay to reach audiences in one block. In spite of all the talk about customised media and user-generated content, both consumers and advertisers want to be part of a larger experience that they can share with others.
That explains why TV-viewing in the US refuses to die the quiet death it was supposed to. As advertising rebounds in the US this year, the growth in television ad revenues has surprised almost everybody. It shouldn’t.
Matt O’Grady, executive vice president for audience measurement at Nielsen, tracks how much TV Americans are watching, across devices and time. So, whether they are watching a show recorded on their digital video recorder (DVR), on the mobile, online or on the idiot box, he tracks all of that for advertisers. O’Grady says that more than 60 per cent of the TV Americans watch is on the good old idiot box, and then comes online, and then mobile. In fact, Americans watch less than four hours of TV in a month online, compared to an average of five hours they spend daily on the idiot box.
More important, as his colleague John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen online, says, the ad rates for online TV-viewing are a fraction of those for the same show on TV. That is because “brands are not able to tell their story in a two-ten second banner ad, like they do in a 30 seconder. The TV is a much more powerful vehicle for storytelling than the Internet for doing it,” says he.
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Go online and the story is the same. Gautam Anand, director, Google Content Partnerships for Asia Pacific, confirms that it is the professional content on YouTube that makes money, not the user-generated content. That means the shows, songs and films you watched on old media devices are the ones you are most likely to watch online.
Whichever way you look at it, the story is the same. Whether audiences splinter, devices do or content does, the instinct to huddle around the fireplace is strong among consumers. And advertisers want to catch them in that en masse huddle, over a film, a song or a TV show.
This is not to say the niche audiences, devices or content don’t work. They do. And this is where whole lot variables come into play — the stage of life for the brand, the marketing objectives, the state of competition and so on. For instance, when Hutch changed to Vodafone, the best way to create awareness was through a blockbuster campaign across all popular media. However, to advertise every small change of tariff plans or new features, more targeted media, read speciality or niche, would work better.
What does the resilience of old media in highly mature markets, such as the US, show? It means that in India too mass media will dominate for decades to come. Currently, India is such an under-penetrated media market that it is almost foolish to talk about the death of mass media.
Can we, therefore, just sit back and enjoy the good old TV, newspapers and radio just the way they are. And count our blessings that the crores they make are not becoming thousands a la the US newspaper industry.