Make the TV Commercials Stop
20th Century Advertising in the 21st Century
I hate television advertising. I find it mind-numbing, vapid, or even, at times, insulting. And, in my mind, it has gotten so much worse over the years as advertisers attempt to come up with new ways to jolt viewers into paying attention — or at least to make something “memorable,” no matter how stupid. Honestly, it’s one of the main reasons why I cut the cord several years back. And why I have no intention of ever going back to traditional television (even as I’m watching more of it, content-wise, via other means).
I was reminded of this hatred recently during the NBA playoffs. Major sporting events are basically the only time I watch live TV now, and because both the Golden State Warriors (the hometown team where I’ve lived the past decade) and the Cleveland Cavaliers (the hometown team where I grew up) not only had long playoff runs, but ended up playing each other in an epic 7-game Finals, I watched far more live TV than I have in the past many years. And that, unfortunately, meant watching more television ads.
It was dreadful. Worse than I remembered. And it’s not just that the ads were awful — though they were — it’s that almost none of them even seem targeted at me.¹ And I’m, at least on paper, a millennial. The oldest living millennial, sure, but still a millennial. Aren’t I supposed to be the prime demographic for advertisers right now?
I found myself thinking about this while reading Ben Thompson’s fantastic piece on TV advertising’s “comeback” — aside: if you don’t subscribe to Thompson’s Stratechery, you absolutely should, it’s well worth the $10/month or $100/year, I just wish he would move over to Medium :) — where he lists the top 25 advertisers in the U.S. when it comes to television:
4 telecom companies (AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Softbank/Sprint)
4 automobile companies (General Motors, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota)
4 credit card companies (America Express, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Capital One)
3 consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies (Procter & Gamble, L’Oréal, Johnson & Johnson)
3 entertainment companies (Disney, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox)
3 retailers (Walmart, Target, Macy’s)
1 from electronics (Samsung), pharmaceuticals (Pfizer), and beer (Anheuser-Busch InBev)
Are these companies intertwined in my life in various ways? Sure. But most I simply put up with (banks, credit cards) or downright loathe (AT&T, Comcast). Let’s just say I have no affinity for almost any of them, and the ads aren’t going to help.
But the real issue is something Thompson brings up that I hadn’t really considered before. We all know that advertising is undergoing a major shift as more and more dollars and eyeballs move online (both the web in general, of course, but increasingly mobile, mobile, mobile, in particular). But there’s a flip-side that is also true, and arguably more transformative: the advertisers themselves aren’t really changing. They’re all 20th century brands. And each of those brands is under assault by some “internet business” in some way.
As Thompson perfectly puts it:
These companies were built on TV, and TV was built on their advertisements, and while they are propping each other up for now, the decline of one will hasten the decline of the other.
Obviously, some of these “internet businesses” (which probably feels as silly to write as it is to read) are increasingly advertising on television. I saw a ton of ads for Google’s Android operating system during the Finals, for example. And even some startups are dabbling in this — gotta love those Slack ads, in particular. But it’s hard to see a world in which these guys ever advertise on television at the scale at which the current heavyweights are doing it. And this is problematic for television, as we currently know it, to say the least.²
Now, I’m not predicting the death of advertising, I just believe that it’s likely to morph faster than people realize. Google’s business is based on this. Facebook’s business is based on this in a slightly different way. And soon, it seems destined that Snapchat will have a huge business based on this. Because it’s the latter, probably more so than anyone else out there right now, except for maybe YouTube, that can bridge the gap from television advertising — again, long the greatest form of advertising — to something akin to it in the new way of the world.
But again, the true key isn’t really shifting advertising as we’ve known it on television to these newer services, it’s getting actual advertisers that make sense in this day and age as well.
I saw more car ads in the past few weeks than I can wrap my head around. I’m probably never going to buy another car again. And if I do, it will undoubtedly be a Tesla, which currently doesn’t advertise on television.³
¹ Except the beer and movie ads. Those are right in my wheelhouse. Still, the vast majority of those are dumb and/or give away too much of the plot.
² Not to mention the sports leagues themselves, which are currently in the middle of what can only be described as a salary bubble because of the amount of money the television networks are paying them for content. Again, this is not sustainable.
³ Cue the “he’s out of touch — not normal!” arguments. Maybe. Or maybe I’m just ahead of a curve here. One that I’d probably watch if I was in either television or advertising.
Standard disclosure that the venture capital fund where I’m a partner, GV, is a sibling of Google under the Alphabet umbrella. They undoubtedly know far more than I do about advertising. But I probably know more about beer.
