The power of TV advertising There is no denying the power of TV advertising for brand marketing with its unparalleled scale and iconic campaigns capable of capturing the popular imagination. But with changes to the marketing landscape and the appearance of new channels, many organizations are now asking themselves whether TV delivers the returns it once did. Knowing the disadvantages and limitations of TV advertising is a must if you want to make wise decisions about the allocation of your marketing budget.
This total guide on the main cons of TV advertising, including increasing costs and declining viewer trends. We’ll take a closer look at how these challenges affect businesses of every size, and share some pointers to help you determine whether or not television advertising is the right choice for your marketing objectives and financial limitations.
The Television Advertising High Barrier Costs
Television ads cost a lot more than purchasing space on-air. Professional-quality commercials can cost tens of thousands or even millions of dollars to produce when including the cost of talent, donated use of time and locations, special effects and post production work.
Airtime expenses further add to production costs. Primetime slots on the major broadcasters fetch a premium price that can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single 30-second spot. Local TV advertising, while cheaper than national advertising, was another form of advertising that you have to keep investing in to keep top of mind.
Television advertising is a luxury that many small and medium sized businesses cannot afford. The base minimum investment required for television advertising to achieve any significant amount of awareness often represents an entire year’s marketing budget for growth-stage companies. This significant obstacle to entry makes TV advertising a service used primarily by big businesses who have the means to invest in marketing.
The financial burden for television ads can also be difficult to predict. Demand for certain time periods, seasonal programming fluctuations and breaking news events can all severely inflate airtime rates with little notice, and advertisers may not even know if they’ll be scheduled when they do pay up.
Declining Viewership and Audience Fragmentation
Television ratings have been slipping over the past decade as more people choose streaming services, on their own time. The decline has been especially steep for young people, many of whom never even subscribe to a TV package of any kind and spend little time watching live TV.
Via streaming services and digital platforms, audiences have dispersed to soo many viewing options that it’s harder for an advertiser to capture a huge audience in one fell swoop through TV ads. If television once provided access to millions of potential viewers all at once, now audiences are rampant across platforms and viewing times.
The growth of ad-free streaming subscriptions has led to a generation of consumers that are more likely to steer clear of the traditional ad experience. Such viewers now perceive TV commercials as an interruptive nuisance once they get used to uninterrupted consumption of content, which may create adverse brand associations.
Through DVR technology and time-shifted viewing, it’s possible to skip commercials altogether, which diminishes the TV ad’s effective reach even for those who still watch traditional programming. Research has revealed that as much as a significant proportion of television ads are fast forwarded or changed, thereby reducing the impact and return on spend.
Limited Targeting and Personalization Capabilities
Targeting is much coarser on television than online. As much as an advertiser can chose which show and time to reach a certain demographic, he or she can not target people based on their behavior, purchase history or interest in a specific thing.
T…The scale that made TV advertising so attractive is now a liability in personalized marketing. Businesses squander large fragments of their advertising budget targeting audiences that are not suited for the promotion of their goods or services, decreasing advertising campaign effectiveness.
Geographic targeting restrictions result in wasted ad spend for businesses with a local reach or focus whenever advertising on TV. Local TV advertising is frequently served to locations that are well outside a company’s service area – causing impressions to go to waste and ROI to suffer.
Unlike digital ad platforms where ads are dynamically optimized and audiences are shaped, TV ad campaigns are relatively static once they go live. It’s also not straightforward for advertisers to tinker with targeting parameters, change messaging, or adjust budget away from performance data in-flight.
Measurement and Attribution Challenges
Data measuring television advertising is based largely on projected viewers, rather than actual individual tracking of viewers. These rating systems offer estimates on who may have watched ads, but not on who actually viewed content or how engaged they were with particular commercials.
Now here’s the problem: It’s hard to connect TV advertising directly to business results because of these attribution challenges. While digital channels can often offer very clear conversion tracking, impact from TV advertising can present in indirect and delayed ways that are difficult to reliably track.
Television ads have a long-term brand building effect: One that is worthwhile, albeit, hard to put a finger on. Businesses find it hard to justify television adverts spend when they can’t prove a direct measurable return on the spend.
Moreover, multi-channel customer journeys further complicate television advertising attribution. We get television-ad impressions, but people convert elsewhere, so it’s hard to give television-ads their fair shake in the conversion path.”
No Flexibility or Real-Time Optimization
As you probably know, TV campaigns must be planned, produced and aired months in advance. After an ad is created and booked, corrections are cost-prohibitive and very time-consuming then, advertisers” hands are tied in reacting flexibly to market conditions or opportunities.
Television has inflexible advertising, so it is difficult to update for timeliness or pricing to fluctuate with market conditions. You can’t just stop, change or optimise a TV campaign on the fly for real-time performance data or external circumstances.
The constraints of creative TV advertising formats limit how companies can convey their messages. Time slots and technical parameters prevent certain types of stories, and might not get across to all products and services in a desirable way.
With seasonal variations in demand and inventory obstacles, it’s not easy to add or subtract television dollars based on business conditions. Advertisers are increasingly forced to sign up for longer-running campaigns or agree to less suitable time periods, which don’t work so well.
Attention Competition and Ad Clutter
The amount of advertising in television has significantly increased, which generates noise that individual commercials must compete with. During ad breaks, often we have to face several competing combinations of ads in the same ad pod.
Audience tiredness due to overexposure to advertising impairs the impact of television advertising. People get used to ad messages and some actively avoid them when they can, limiting the effectiveness of good ads as well.
Television watching is a passive act and audiences are not actively pursuing advertising content, as it is with search marketing where an intent is specifically expressed by users. This passive viewing can lead to decreased engagement and lower retention rates for messages.
There is also other media during commercials as the viewer has plenty of choices if they are ready to leave the ad. Mobile, social and more offer convenient distractions from television commercials.
Technical and Production Complexity
Not very many businesses have the in-house expertise or even equipment necessary to produce TV ads. Professionally produced commercials require technical proficiency in video production, audio, broadcast standards and often require the purchase of third-party rights that might not be inexpensive.
This order of magnitude of additional complexity is also a big opportunity for things to go wrong when broadcasting on TV. Ads have to adhere to very stringent technical requirements around colour correction, audio levels, and file formats that depend on expertise and equipment to meet broadcast quality.
TV ad production timelines are generally long and not so flexible. TV advertising involves scripting, casting, filming, editing, and other post-production activities that can span weeks, even months, to finish, making the TV an improper medium where immediacy in marketing is a must.
Changes to TV ads after production is completed are both costly and time consuming. Unlike digital creative, which can be replaced or altered relatively easily, a television commercial requires a significant amount of additional investment to change once production is under way.
Regulatory and Content Restrictions
Television advertising is subject to many laws and regulations covering advertising, content and advertising placement. FCC rules, trade practices, and network protocols restrict ad content and rendering.
Some sectors are subject to extra regulation and the ability to advertise on TV is further limited. Pharmaceuticals, financial services and alcohol also have to contend with tightly regulated terrain that restricts their messaging and raises their legal compliance costs.
Television networks may slow or censor a campaign launch and force alteration of a message to the point of the message becoming impotent. Networks also retain editorial control over ad content and can reject commercials that do not meet their standards.
Time of Day Limitations Some ads can only be broadcast at certain times of the day, further limiting how much inventory is available and driving up the cost to those businesses who have something that may only be advertised at certain points in the day.
Rethinking Your Advertising Strategy
“(here)Maruti Teases The Dzire Facelift In New TVC – Video 2020-05-06 / People are cranky when they haven’t chosen well, and to avoid the trauma of having to buy another car a month after shelling out over Rs. Although television commercials still bring drive for some businesses and campaigns, the constraints of the medium render it an inappropriate approach to achieving many modern marketing goals.
Frequently digital marketing channels appear as more appealing, lower cost options to television advertising because the latter entails high costs, restricted targeting options, and is difficult to measure. SEO, social media and programmatic display advertising are more flexible, more targeting and better able to measure performance at a lower cost.
Use television advertisements as one part of a multimedia marketing plan, not your only option. Strategically employed with other digital marketing channels, television advertising can offer brand-building benefits that a more focused, performance-oriented digital campaign doesn’t.
Consider your individual business objectives, audience and the budget you have to spend before deciding upon television advertising. For most companies, the negatives of TV advertising exceed the positives and as such a better use of marketing investment is denial to TV in favor of another channel that offers better response for growth plans.
Understanding the cons of television advertising can help you decide when to seek expert advice, making it clear why hiring an inbound marketing consultant might be the right step to optimize your overall strategy.
