Media usage and the 2009 upfront

It’s Monday, 4 weeks from opening what should be a new franchise product at a Hollywood movie studio and the Nielsen theatrical tracking report shows significant vulnerability due to low awareness and ‘intent to see,’ so the marketing team is reviewing critical TV spots that, all hope, will turn around a flagging campaign. This is a typical marketing problem, with a turn to the typical lever, TV advertising, as the likely solution.

Now, I am a big fan of TV advertising and find that it is effective to communicate brand attributes and to connect emotionally with consumers – if they are watching. But that’s a big “if.” TV advertising is starting to feel more like trying to grab people as they pass by, and thanks to the one-third national penetration of Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) that allow viewers to skip over the ads, it’s more like watching them speed by in Ferraris.

The rule enshrined in marketing mantra is “you don’t get fired for buying broadcast.” So in our movie example, the marketing team tinkers with the creative content of the ads, weighing the placement in various time slots, and discusses the viewing habits of consumer quadrants.

However, in a changing consumer landscape of media fragmentation and seismic shifts in consumer time spent per medium, are we as marketers sticking to historical solutions that have become outdated? Is “how do we make TV ads more effective” even the right question to ask? As our customers are being more selective with their time, how do we reach them? Looking at eroding ratings on broadcast and at the punishing drop in subscriptions for all areas of the print business, we should more correctly ask, “Where are consumers are spending their time?”

One place that has seen a sizable shift of consumer time-spent is the Internet and, in particular, the explosive growth of social networking. According to a new study from Nielsen, social networking is the fourth-most-popular online activity, passing personal email, and still growing. Last year, the category grew three times faster than the rate of growth for the Internet overall. Facebook, says Nielsen, is now the world’s most popular social network and is visited by 30 percent of people online each month across the nine markets that Nielsen tracks.

Compare this with the continuing atrophy of the print business. Newspapers, once a destination medium for movie information, have lost eyeballs to ticketing sites like Fandango, Movietickets, Yahoo Movies and MovieFone. The audience usage of these sites and the online medium as a whole is expanding significantly.

So as we look forward to the 2009 upfront season, it may be instructive to look at the available opportunities in a marketer’s ecosystem and take into account that traditional tools and levers are facing challenges (C3, live-plus 7, fragmentation and erosion). Perhaps attention should be paid to media other than TV where consumers are spending their time. An incremental shift in spending from last year’s $9 billion network and $8 billion cable upfront to the Internet has the potential to significantly impact marketing effectiveness.

To go back to our movie example, I would not recommend shifting millions of dollars from TV advertising to online once you find yourself in a panic situation; however, proper planning using all media where consumers are spending their time, and employing campaign levers in the correct sequencing, will go a long way towards keeping this sort of crises from occurring in the first place.