Move Over Television Advertising
In the land of advertising, TV has long been the top sought after medium. When looking at the average American’s leisure activities, TV viewing contributes to over half of the country’s down time at almost two and three quarter hours per day. This abundance of American sitcom/news/reality TV viewing has also earned the highest tab for an advertising spot. Is this high ticket really worth it? A recent ComScore study seems to disprove this. Move over plasma, hello laptop.
The study followed the consumer habits of 200,000 participants with exposure to only online ads versus those with only television ad exposure. The results showed that online advertising lifted sales at an average of 9%, while television campaigns fell behind with an 8% boost. In the press release regarding the study, ComScore’s executive’s proposed the success fell within the campaigns ability to highly target the necessary demographic.
Online banner advertising allows sites to target through “zag” or zip, age, and gender in addition to interactive flash and click throughs with specific product information. Additionally, online advertising programs like Google’s AdWords match up advertisers with their target market via search phrases. Television claims similar targeting results via prime “spots”, times, channels, etc. In addition to these results being immeasurable unlike that of online advertising they lack the specificity that online targeting has mastered.
So then what justifies the high cost of that prime time commercial spot? Or the pre-news roll? Why haven’t the introduction of Hulu.com and TiVo made this price differential obsolete? A recent Nielson poll showed online video usage up 25% this year. With this vast source of information and entertainment available all day every day why aren’t the online media sites increasing their prices? With the average home containing 3.5 TV’s and 1.5 Computers there is an obvious advantage.
With the decrease in PC prices and ability to view movies and television programs from the comfort of your desk chair or lap it’s only a matter of time before these numbers flip flop. Although TV advertising will never go away, as we see a correlation in increased PC ownership and usage and decreased normal TV viewing, I predict we’ll see the rise of the online advertising empire.
