The Beginning of The End for TV Advertising?
Marketing budgets are hit the same way as any other expenses as recession hits. When dollars are tight, those in charge have to examine how best to spend what remains.
Shifting the Marketing Dollars – Companies with good brand awareness (e.g. HP for computers, Century21 for realtors) don’t need more exposure. Marketing dollars are not cut, just shifted to other media (online, paid search, social media, etc.).
From Marketing to Bread-and-Butter – Brick-and-Mortar stores have to compete with online stores such as Amazon or the deep discounters like Walmart. Companies like Best Buy reallocates their marketing dollars towards beefing up their physical stores, more helpful sales people, and (of course) their online bestbuy.com web site.
Smarter TVs – CES showcased a few web-connected TVs. With the amount of video content available on the web, it’s natural to bundle Internet into TVs. But the side-effect of this is that people have more control on programming. Just like TiVo lets viewers redefine prime-time, web-connected TVs will enable viewers to redefine what’s TV programming.
For more details about Maverick CMOs (at least partially) ditching TV ads, see this article.
