HOME / ad report card: Advertising deconstructed.

Is Television Over?An intriguing new book about the ad recession's next victim.

By Seth StevensonPosted Monday, Aug. 10, 2009, at 12:07 PM ET

If you love to hate ads, you might enjoy two new books that train their sights on modern marketing. The first makes the case that advertising as we know it is about to be obliterated. The second suggests that we should all dance a gleeful polka on its grave.

RSS

In The Chaos Scenario, Bob Garfield—ad critic for Advertising Age and co-host of the NPR show On the Media—argues that the long-standing, two-way partnership between advertising and content is due for a violent rejiggering. This notion is a familiar one by now, but Garfield asserts that the big ad agencies and media companies haven't yet managed to fully internalize it. (Particularly television networks, which have so far weathered the storm in a way that newspapers haven't.) Garfield also claims that the painful consequences of this upheaval will extend to you, the content consumer. You've probably already noticed the punishing body blow delivered to your local newspaper after once-lucrative advertising niches such as classifieds and real estate got eaten by the Internet. Garfield's feeling is that your beloved television shows will soon meet a similar fate.

There are now hundreds of cable channels and any number of captivating items to look at on the Web. As a result, the television audience is scattering. In 2008, Garfield notes, a top-rated TV drama like The Mentalist might have been watched by 3.2 percent of the U.S. population in a given week. Fifty years ago, a top drama like Gunsmoke would have been routinely watched by three times as many Americans percentagewise. It's much harder these days for a major advertiser to find the concentrated mass of eyeballs it needs to reach in order to boost its sales numbers. Garfield argues that those most affected by this sea change haven't yet faced up to the new reality.

Television networks, for example—which, though not as widely watched as they used to be, are still the only place to go to find eyeballs in any concentration at all—have so far been able to keep revenues relatively intact by charging higher rates per viewer while reaching fewer viewers. The rug is due to be pulled out from under them. The upshot, in Garfield's view: a vicious cycle in which television audiences fragment, so advertisers stop paying big bucks to run commercials on TV shows, so the funding for the shows dries up, so the quality of the shows declines, so the audience begins to flee even faster.

Related in Slate

Farhad Manjoo considered the options and ethics behind popular ad-removal software. James Surowiecki discussed the advertising trend that depicts consumers as befuddled, bumbling idiots. Seth Stevenson compiled readers' recommendations for examples of terrible advertising, and rated catchy credit report ads.

I'm not sure I buy the part about quality playing a role in audience behavior. Not when a show like The Bachelorette is a ratings winner. (Garfield might argue that even tripe like this offers network-level production values and thus requires a production budget that soon won't be sustainable.) But it seems reasonable to assume that advertisers will at some point refuse to pay hefty fees to capture ever-shrinking slices of the population. Eventually—and in fact, it's already happening—they'll find other uses for their marketing dollars.

This means there will be no one to foot the bill for your favorite high-quality show, unless 1) it's on a premium channel like HBO, where the revenue comes from subscriptions instead of ads, or 2) it's a bunch of webisodes, made on a shoestring, that air on YouTube and don't require a deep-pocketed sponsor. For now, 1 is much more likely than 2. While there's no doubt some terrific low-budget stuff that's being made for the Web—and this stuff will certainly get better and better—at this point, not a lot of it compares to The Wire. Or, for that matter, The Mentalist. (To paraphrase a joke I recently heard somewhere: What do you call a homemade video that holds your attention for 20 minutes? A celebrity sex tape.)

Page: 1 | 2 SINGLE PAGE

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate. He is the author of Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World.

COMMENTS

I would have added iTunes (or equivalent) or DVD as the 3rd way to pay for quality shows. I would bet anything that Dollhouse was renewed based mostly on expected DVD sales.

I totally agree with the sentiment in the first book. I watch far more "television" that has been PVR'd (sans commercials), DVD'd, or otherwise acquired than by watching it at 8pm on ABC.

I think the solution, for content producers is the following:

1) Dump cable providers (long term). When broadband improves juuuust enough, you cut out the middle man.

2) Consumer purchased TV. i.e. if Firefly floated the idea of pre-selling a season's worth of DVD's, I'd bet anything they could make enough money to fund the season's production in advance.

Obviously that only works for established/cult shows...

3) Demo DVDs. Much like AOL in the old days. How about packing the first two episodes of show X when you buy a season's worth of show Y?

4) Accept less money. I know, I know, but maybe a TV "star" isn't worth 350K an episode in the new reality.

5) Add to the "experience" through a comprehensive campaign. i.e Hugh Laurie could answer questions via a "mailbag" format, Twitter etc... builds fan loyalty.

6) Develop iTunes competitor. I've never understood why the industry doesn't create its own version of iTunes. Why pay Apple 30% just to sell your content?

Anyway, a few thoughts...

-- therantguy
(To reply, click here)

The article makes a lot of good points, but fragmentation of the audience can lead to some higher-quality programming as well. Network programming was always driven by the lowest common denominator of a mass audience. Cable channels can operate more cheaply, and so they can develop more discerning programming aimed a smaller niche.

Think of some of the good shows developed on cable that never would have been a network hit: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Project Runway, Intervention, Rescue Me, The Shield, What Not to Wear, Iron Chef, America's Best Dance Crew, Pimp My Ride, Monk, etc.

Obviously, there's a ton of useless dreck on cable too, but even useless dreck can be forged into a gem: witness Joel McHale and The Soup.

-- Tom_Tildrum
(To reply, click here)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES