• by Brian Wieser , July 6, 2011

TV's Creative Renaissance: Will Better Measurement Allow More Consumers to See it Themselves? Television advertisements can be the most effective pieces of commercial art ever created.

The annual Cannes Festival of Advertising is the world's showcase for all forms of advertising. The power of 30 seconds of sight-sound-and-motion was fully evident during screenings for all work entered in the Film, Film Craft, and Titanium and Integrated Lions categories, which I was fortunate enough to attend last month.

Hundreds and hundreds of campaigns, which had previously been exposed to millions and millions of individuals around the world, were shown as part of these screenings. Given the depth of creativity applied to commercials today, why does it often seem like there are so many bad commercials airing on TV today? The fragmentation of TV is at the heart of this problem.

Today's audience panels are sufficient to measure broad-reaching network TV viewing and many of the most popular cable networks during prime time. But cable programming now accounts for a majority of television viewing, and non-prime dayparts account for a majority of cable viewing. Small panels are simply insufficient to measure this fragmentation.

There are hundreds of viewing choices available to the average consumer, but many of those choices -- as much as 40% of viewing by our estimates -- go essentially un-measured.

Large brands conventionally avoid this advertising inventory, and consequently, cable programmers and cable operators rely heavily on direct response advertisements. With few exceptions, direct response commercials are far from the quality we saw in Cannes. Low quality creative is undoubtedly grating to audiences and (unfortunately for cable programmers) probably causes audiences to tune away.

We believe that better approaches to measuring television viewing will solve this problem, increasing the chances that commercials viewed by consumers at any time of day and on any network are as engaging and creative as those seen on network prime time. Happily, many companies are working on solutions today.

At Simulmedia, we have established a panel involving millions of set-top boxes, enough to accurately measure all television viewing across the country. Because our set-top data panel is highly correlated with Nielsen's panels, we can identify Nielsen targeting attributes across all television advertising inventory, including that inventory which otherwise goes unmeasured.

Between our approach and the efforts of others, we think many large brand advertisers will ultimately become comfortable buying audiences during times of the day and on networks which may otherwise have been deemed undesirable.

There is an ongoing creative renaissance in television advertising the world over. As a result of the industry's efforts to improve measurement of viewing, Americans will get to see more of this creative renaissance for themselves.