Editor’s Leader column, July 2009

Can anyone tell me if this is a first – a television commercial to promote advertising on the telly? The ad currently running on UK screens shows a man on a psychiatrist’s couch breaking out of a trance-like regressive state to sing snippets of old TV ad jingles: ‘Nuts, whole hazlenuts, Cadbury’s take ’em and they cover them with chocolate . . . Just one Cornetto, give it to me . . . I’m a secret lemonade drinker, RWhite’s . . . etc.’ A sort of adman’s Tourette’s Syndrome. The tagline is: ‘30 seconds that last a lifetime. Television, giving brands their breaks.’

This self-promotion is presumably in response in some degree to the recession – but is also the result of what we all knew, that the traditional TV king is dying, if not already dead (long live the DM king). Sadly, the fact that programme producers have shrinking ad budgets creates a Catch 22 scenario – viewers are tiring of cheap reality rubbish (Come Dine With Big Brother’s Got Talent In The Attic) and are switching off in droves . . . and that turn-off further affects adspend.  

In the UK, experts say TV ad rates will shrink by 16 per cent this year, hitting their lowest level since the ’80s (page 4). Newspapers around the world are similarly afflicted and are having to think creatively in order to survive (page 16). The key to the survival of traditional channels is one word: Measurement – and that’s the definition of direct marketing, which has been inching its way up from ‘below-the-line’ to soar way above it.

It’s the web – and therefore its soulmate direct – which is propping up television advertising: TV ads are circulating as viral videos (page 5) and reaching an audience that simply doesn’t watch the telly any more. TV commercials such as the Cadbury’s gorilla playing drums à la Phil Collins – an engaging ad which got word-of-mouth attention – also generated huge, measurable web downloads resulting in a ten per cent uplift in sales in the UK (watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzFRV1LwIo& feature=player). In South Africa currently, that gorilla campaign includes another modern direct channel – an SMS competition number on the wrapper.

Then there’s the superb Aleksandr Meerkat TV ads (page 50), which have pushed its market comparison brand up among the top four such sites in the UK – the Internet video ‘out-takes’ which regularly hit my inbox are even better than the TV commercials (http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hfOt1qoALo&feature=related).

All this one-to-one activity has provided vital measurability the original mass media ads could not. I salute the creative teams which dreamed up the TV ads and thus have given our industry cachet: DM has at last become sexy.