Seven reasons why TV’s doubters are wrong

Ofcom has produced its annual ‘Media Nations’ report and, as usual, the picture it paints is contradictory to the one presented within so much of marketing.

While the ‘TV is dead’ meme seems to have disappeared under the sheer weight of continued ad spending, there is still a recurring view among many marketers that it is only a matter of time before TV expires.

And yet the data from Ofcom, once again, suggests TV’s death dive continues to be overstated and misinformed. The report itself weighs in at more than 100 pages and I would encourage every marketer to take a look. But the killer slide, at least for me, is the ‘time watched’ graphic shown above.

What this simple bar chart demonstrates is that TV remains the predominant medium for video consumption in this country. That’s really all I wanted to say in this week’s column. I might just wrap it up here in paragraph four if that’s OK with you?

But, of course, it’s probably not, because you’re a marketer and the dominant, prevailing ideology of marketing is that TV is in freefall and whatever you want to call the digital alternative – streaming, Facebook, YouTube or just The Future – now runs the show.

So, although I have nothing really to say in my column this week other than a) look at the fucking bar chart and b) no, really LOOK at it, I suspect I might need to answer those digitally addled marketers’ most common, fundamentally misplaced, queries about the chart above.

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