TV

Guest Post by: Ed Thompson

On Tuesday, as part of social media week, I attended an event on “The Future of TV Advertising – Keeping it Social”. The discussion centered on how social media can bring the fragmented viewing experience back to a shared one.

Say Media (formely VideoEgg and Six Apart) is releasing today a potentially interesting "Off The Grid" study (see it in my Google Docs) about people who are consuming less live and more streaming and on-demand TV. The study breaks these people down into two groups:

A few years back, when Sydney & I went to Australia, we arrived at the hotel about noon after a 22 hour trip. We didn't want to go do anything, we just wanted to zone in the room before venturing out. Sydney walked right over to the TV set, picked up the remote and said

"Can I watch one of my shows?"

They make it sound like it's a good news.

Center for Research Excellence released new findings from their massive and very expensive ($3.5M) ethnographic study of media consumption behavior. The researchers observed and recorded behaviors of 376 adults in four markets for the average period of 33 hours each or roughly two full waking days (or "three-quarters of a million minutes" altogether, as they prefer to put it.) 

In American Idol, Neuromarketing Style I noted that the Fox show I’d really like to see brain activity for was the ultra-intense drama 24. The combination of suspense, rapid-fire action, and occasional brutality would make for some interesting brain scans. But what of the ads that have to follow, say, a scene where a blowtorch-wielding Jack Bauer tries to extract information from an uncooperative villain?

Last week, neuromarketing firm Neurofocus released summary results of a study that compared the performance of the same ad when run on television and on two Internet websites, Facebook and a website controlled by the advertiser. The commercial tested was “Trip For Life,” part of VISA’s multimedia campaign built around the 2010 Winter Olympics. (Neurofocus conducted these tests for its own research purposes, not because they were commissioned by the advertiser.)

Like many of you, I enjoy reading The Ad Contrarian blog, ran by an agency CEO Bob Hoffman. In a sense, TAC is the ad industry's Perez Hilton: he draws in crowds by doodling on faces of today's idols; more often than not that's online advertising in general and social media in particular. Some of his posts are right on target, others are wildly off, but all are usually entertaining.