Death of the TV Ad

If music videos killed the radio star in the eighties, online video is killing the TV ad today. Online video has changed the advertising game in a big way and it may never be the same again. With the decline of traditional television viewership due to the rise in services like Netflix and Hulu more and more brands are shifting their advertising budgets from TV to online.

When the first basic cable network launched in the late 1970s advertising agencies instantly knew that broadcast television was going to be a powerful advertising medium. So they put a lot of money into getting ads on TV.

Today advertisers are seeing that potential all over again with web video. In the past couple of years the number of creators and distributors of original web programming has exploded. More people are watching and binging shows online than watching it live on TV. So it’s easy to see why big brands are shifting their focus from TV to online.

This year alone we’ve seen brands create more content for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat than ever before. They have gone from spending millions on 5 to 10 big TV ad spends a year to taking that money and making thousands of pieces of microcontent online instead. Brands are now able to buy more eyeballs and target more specifically through online channels for far cheaper than what mass TV media buys still cost.

These charts from Digiday show just how TV ad spending stacks up against digital. Internet advertising is surging while television ad spends are barely growing. They project that by 2017 the Internet will overtake TV to be the leading advertising medium.

Another major plus with web video content is that it’s much more trackable. Brands can track way more analytics than ever possible with TV ads. So with the wealth of data and information that is available it makes it easier for marketers to justify media buys because they have actual insights and numbers to back it up. And that’s just something that television ads can’t offer.

StoryCraft has been on the cutting edge of this shift since the beginning. We don’t do TV commercials or major ad spends because we know that TV is on the decline. We create online content that appeals to niche audiences online to drive real, measurable results. Microcontent on the web is really the core of our business where we are putting all our chips for the future.

Brands can no longer talk AT their customers with television ads. Viewers want to be part of the conversation and online content allows them to do just that. By creating shorter more involved pieces of content, brands are able to tell a story worth sharing. So all around, online content offers way more than traditional TV ads. It offers conversation, a plethora of channel distribution, more accurate data, and so much more. Web video is the future and in a fight between online and TV, it’s obvious that TV is more than likely in for a knock out.