Television advertisement

A television advertisement (also called a commercial, spot, break, advert, or ad) is a span of television programming produced and paid for by an organization. It conveys a message promoting, and aiming to market, a product, service or idea. Advertisers and marketers may refer to television commercials as TVCs, while Japan refers to them as CMs (Commercial Messages). Advertising revenue provides a significant portion of the funding for most privately owned television networks. During the 2010s, the number of commercials has grown steadily, though the length of each commercial has diminished. Advertisements of this type have promoted a wide variety of goods, services, and ideas ever since the early days of the history of television. The viewership of television programming, as measured by companies such as Nielsen Media Research in the United States, or BARB in the UK, is often used as a metric for television advertisement placement, and consequently, for the rates which broadcasters charge to advertisers to air within a given network, television program, or time of day (called a "day-part"). In multiple countries, including the United States, television campaign advertisements are commonplace in a political campaign. In other countries, such as France, political advertising on television is heavily restricted, while some countries, such as Norway, completely ban political advertisements. The first official paid television advertisement came out in the United States on July 1, 1941, at 2:30 p.m., over New York station WNBT (subsequently WNBC) before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. The announcement for Bulova watches, for which the company paid anywhere from $4.00 to $9.00 (reports vary), displayed a WNBT test pattern modified to look like a clock with the hands showing the time. The Bulova logo, with the phrase "Bulova Watch Time", appeared in the lower right-hand quadrant of the test pattern while the second hand swept around the dial for one minute. The first TV ad broadcast in the UK went on air on ITV on September 22, 1955, advertising Gibbs SR toothpaste. In Asia, the first TV ad broadcast appeared on Nippon Television in Tokyo on August 28, 1953, advertising Seikosha (subsequently Seiko); it also displayed a clock with the current time. The television market has grown to such an extent that it was estimated to reach $69.87 billion for TV ad spending in the United States for 2018.

General background Television advertising involves three main tasks: creating a television advertisement that meets broadcast standards, placing the advertisement on television to reach the desired customer and then measuring the outcomes of these ads, including the return on investment. To accomplish the first step means different things to different parts of the world depending on the regulations in place. In the UK for example, clearance must be given by the body Clearcast. Another example is Venezuela where clearance is governed by a body called El Centro Nacional Autónomo de la Cinematografía (CNAC). The clearance provides a guarantee to the broadcasters that the content of the advertisement meets legal guidelines. Because of this, special extended clearance sometimes applies to food and medical products as well as gambling advertisements. The second is the process of TV advertising delivery and usually incorporates the involvement of a post-production house, a media agency, advertising distribution specialists and the end-goal, the broadcasters. At New York's TV Week in November 2018, the TV advertising model was described by Turner Broadcasting System as broken.

TV advertisement trends

Internet and digital

However, with the emergence of over-the-top media services, the Internet itself has become a platform for television, and hence TV advertising. TV attribution is a marketing concept whereby the impact television ads have on consumers is measured. Addressable television is where targeted advertising is used on digital platforms, so two people watching the same show receive different ads.

Digital television recorders and advertisement skipping

After the video cassette recorder (VCR) became popular in the 1980s, the television industry began studying the impact of users fast-forwarding through commercials. Advertising agencies fought the trend by making them more entertaining. The introduction of digital video recorders (also known as digital television recorders or DTRs), such as TiVo, and services like Sky+, Dish Network and Astro MAX, which allow the recording of television programs into a hard drive, also enabled viewers to fast-forward or automatically skip through advertisements of recorded programs. At the end of 2008, 22% of UK households had a DTR. The majority of these households had Sky+ and data from these homes (collected via the SkyView panel of more than 33,000) shows that, once a household gets a DTR, they watch 17% more television. 82% of their viewing is to normal, linear, broadcast TV without fast-forwarding the ads. In the 18% of TV viewing that is time-shifted (i.e. not watched as live broadcast), viewers still watch 30% of the ads at normal speed. Overall, the extra viewing encouraged by owning a DTR results in viewers watching 2% more ads at normal speed than they did before the DTR was installed. The SkyView evidence is reinforced by studies on actual DTR behaviour by the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB) and the London Business School.

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