Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The Future of TV Advertising

I am not sure how many of you caught Ben Silverman on Charlie Rose last night but it was quite an interesting interview (http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9554#frame_top) and got me thinking about the fate of advertising in TV. As they sat and discussed the growing use of time-shifting technology the move of companies wanting to do advertising will move to product placement. That raised a few questions for me that I would love to get people's thoughts on:

1) According to a lot of stuff I have been reading, product placement has not brought the success companies thought (and advertising companies pitched) it would. If this is going to be the de-facto standard what needs to change to make it successful? Is there any meaningful way to measure the success of this type of advertising?

2) Putting my TV executives hat on, I always thought a major way to generate follow up revenue on the success of a series was to eventually license it to someone else on a different network. If this is the case, will NBC want to buy a show from TNT stuffed with product placement ads from GM if their advertisers are Toyota? I am assuming there will be a fine line between what people (read: viewers) are willing to accept vs. an infomercial-esque TV series (Vincent D'Onofrio using a Dell laptop vs. him eating a sandwich from Jimmy's Deli and drinking a Coke while interrogating a suspect).

3) If product placement advertising isn't the answer to save TV, then what is? My quick thoughts on this is that product placement will only work in a subtle fashion and will demand consistency, not only from a particular series but on a given network. Haven't done the market research but I am willing to bet that people have a strong tendency to cling to a network so if every show on ABC uses Dell laptops people will likely think of buying from Dell next time. I would love to see the statistics of the recent success of Taittinger champagne, as Bravo has clearly 'placed' it in nearly every show on the network. I also strongly believe the corresponding web portals will move away from being bolt-on aspects and become a critical component right from the start. Executives will have to think carefully about how best to use these tools as they will play a huge role and will become a major selling point for advertisers.

Would love to hear what other people are thinking about this especially when companies are moving towards using only proven advertising models and/or have short attention span for experimentation.