Mele’s Musings

No Longer “Either/Or” When It Comes to TV and Internet

I have to admit that I watch TV.  Not a ton of it (although my wife might disagree), but enough that I have to say I am a TV watcher.  When I watch TV now, I tend not to do it as much “alone.”  And by that, I mean with me laptop with me (and when it’s fantasy football season, TV and Internet simultaneously becomes an obsession).  And I am one of a growing number of consumers.

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According to Nielsen, “57 percent of TV viewers in the U.S. who have Internet access use both mediums at the same time at least once a month. That translates to more than 128 million U.S. consumers.”

I guess I am not so unique after all.  According to the report, the number of people watching TV and their computers at the same time has steadily increased.

Even more interesting is that, according to the report, the number of hours people are watching TV is actually increasing.  Now, that is interesting.

For marketers, it’s more than time to start thinking differently about the way that advertising campaigns are conceived.  The day of TV leading the idea is simply gone.  This is not to say that TV advertising is dead.  Far from it.  Again, MORE people are watching TV than ever before.  They may be harder to find on any particular channel, but TV is here to stay.

What is needed is a different way to think about campaigns.  They should not start in any medium.  Not on TV, the web, in print or any other medium.  The need for campaigns to break-through the clutter by being louder or more obnxious is out.

What is in is thinking about the consumer first - and not where they are consuming media or when - but rather in thinking about what they need and what their behaviors are.  The campaign, then, needs to be built around them: the things they care about, the things they do, the things they need, and the devices they use to get those things done.

Ads are becoming opportunities to activate consumers, not just entertain or distract them.  The best campaigns are those that try to drive new activities or reinforce current ones.  And with the web tethered to TV more and more (whether through a laptop or a smartphone) and increasingly print (now that we have web browsers in the phones we carry with us), the real opportunity is to activate consumers directly all the time.

Once we start thinking this way, the questions are no longer about what the TV script is, or the cleverness of our copywriting, but rather how good, how useful the environments and experiences we create for our customers are.  All ads play a part in creating something greater, something more in-depth, more experiential, more engaging.

We have to stop thinking about advertising and marketing as ads, and about TV ads as the centerpiece of campaigns.  In fact, we have to stop thinking that the goal of campaigns is to create ads.  The goal of a campaign is to create experiences that resonate with consumers.  In this new age of media multitasking, we have to be more holistic in our strategies and our thinking.

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