TV and Mark Twain; and David Abbott’s f*** outburst

From Thinkbox’s surprising new Payback 4 study, to David Abbott’s legacy as an advertising great, this week Dominic Mills is taking lessons from the present as well as the past.

There’s a lot to comment on this week, which is my not-very-subtle way of justifying this week’s shopping bag of a headline. But the character limit (60, if you really want to know) imposes certain restrictions, and in order to draw your attention to the variety of stuff I think you might find interesting, I’ve crammed two together.

Let’s start with TV. My favourite blogger, the incomparable Bob Hoffmann has, as usual, been setting the world to rights about TV. You can read his pithy thoughts here and here, in effect saying that those who, to borrow from Mark Twain’s comment on his premature obituary, write off TV are barking mad.

As luck would have it, Thinkbox was out and about last week also setting the world to rights, except that they have to be a little more judicious than Hoffmann in their language. The occasion was the unveiling of Payback 4, its latest work, commissioned from Ebiquity, into TV effectiveness and ROI: that’s ROI in the sense of profit rather than the fuzzier sort of metrics that often get bandied about.

If you want to see the full show, watch the webcast here.

Here are some of the things I learnt, all of which surprised me to varying degrees.

1. At £1.79, TV is generating more profit per £ spent than the previous study, between 2008-11 when it generated £1.70, and more than any other medium. It’s the first part that surprises me: compared with 2008-11, the media landscape is more cluttered, and it’s therefore harder for advertisers to get their voice heard. Mobile has arrived (well, sort of), video is growing and Twitter and Facebook have developed their platforms.

So why should it be working better? You can’t say unequivocally that the ads are better, so one explanation is that advertisers are using the medium better: better choice of channel, more precise choice of audience, less wastage perhaps. Perhaps, you might conclude, planners and buyers in media agencies are performing better, or they’ve got better optimisation technology. Score one for media agencies.

2. Radio comes second in this profit-generating chart at £1.52 per £ spent. Who’d have thought that? For a medium that is typically pigeon-holed as a support or tactical platform, that is a terrific performance, all the more so when you consider that, compared to TV, radio creative is, for the most part, lack-lustre and short of emotional punch.

The scale of radio’s impact is new to me, and I suspect, to many others. Which makes you wonder why it isn’t doing more to trumpet its achievements [the RAB might disagree with that – Ed]. Meanwhile, the radio industry should pop round to Thinkbox and say thanks. Score one for radio.

3. TV creates a halo effect around brands, such that, hypothetically, if Barclays advertises a mortgage product, its other products get a boost. According to Ebiquity, 37% of the effects of a TV campaign are on products not directly advertised. Hmm. That’s pretty significant.

The surprise, given the difficulties consumers traditionally have associating ads with specific brands, is the suggestion that as consumers, we have more spaces in our brains for commercial messages than previously thought. Not bad, given the increased mental clutter we all have to deal with. Score one for consumers.

This being so, we’ll probably see two things: one, advertisers will look to create more masterbrands; and two, it may green-light more new-product development such that we get even more spin-offs of, say, Flora or Lynx.

4. TV is creating 33% more branded searches per rating point. This is down to two things: one, the rise of dual-screening; and, two, an increase (from 2% to 16%) in the number of brands featuring an online call to action.

My surprise is that this isn’t larger. It may, of course, reflect Ebiquity’s sample base. According to TVSquared, which has a software package that analyses broadcast spots against online response, there are about 40 e-commerce advertisers (i.e. those who include an online call to action) in the top 250, spending about £315m altogether.

Of those, four – GoCompare, ComparetheMarket, Trivago and Wonga – are in the top 10. And of the 737 advertisers new or returning to TV (Thinkbox figures) in 2013, I’d bet a majority were e-commerce.

Even if you don’t take Ebiquity’s numbers at face value, this is still a market growing rapidly. And if more advertisers use packages like TVSquared’s – such as Diet Chef – the effects will be greater.

David Abbott’s f*** moment

Most people in advertising under the age of 40 won’t remember creative genius David Abbott, who died on Saturday aged 75. But they will know his legacy: a string of brilliant campaigns for the likes of Volvo, the Economist, BT, Sainsbury’s and the RSPCA.

As an individual, he was erudite, witty, civilised, generous, softly-spoken and above all courteous. He was, in the best and truest sense of the word, a gentleman – qualities he brought to all the work he created.

More importantly, he was the A in what is now AMV BBDO, Britain’s biggest agency for the last decade or so. It’s progressive, committed to great work, but above all an agency built on integrity, decency and principle.

At Abbott’s insistence, AMV refused to handle cigarette or toy advertisers, both huge spenders at the time. AMV’s status today owes everything to the culture Abbott, and his partners Peter Mead and Adrian Vickers, laid down.

And to many of today’s creatives, Abbott is as much of an influence and legend as Bill Bernbach.

My former colleague Stefano Hatfield says he was the only person in advertising he wished to work for, and remembers him here.

There will be many much-deserved tributes. I will note two things. One, like many great creatives he had an intuitive understanding of media and how to use it. It was Abbott who realised the masthead of the Economist had the same dimensions as a 48-sheet poster, and recommended the publication spend all its money on the medium.

And second, his f*** moment, when a few years after retiring he wrote a letter lambasting Campaign’s decision to make FCUK the campaign of the year. You can read the full text here, but here’s a flavour:

“Fcuking great idea to put fcuking four-letter words on fcuking big posters, where every fcuking eight-year-old can see them. What a fcuking cool way to get up the noses of those fcuking parents and teacher tossers who are trying to bring their kids up as fcuking goody-goodies.”

It was exactly the kind of advertising he loathed. In his view sensationalist, pointlessly shocking, and degrading of human discourse.

At the time, the letter seemed completely out of character, and today I feel somewhat chastened to read the column I wrote in response. I wish I had been more thoughtful.

Looking back, it is clear the letter was the mark of a man who felt passionately about advertising and that it should contribute to society in the widest sense of the word. That, to me, will be his legacy.

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