Christmas ads ‘Super Bowl’ should be a bonanza for UK broadcasters – why isn’t it?
“Christmas is the the UK Super Bowl of marketing,” New Commercial Arts and Ogilvy CEO James Murphy told the FT this week. Murphy should know, being a veteran of John Lewis at adam&eve, still the defining Christmas ads, and now Sainsbury’s.
But it’s getting to feel like the Super Bowl in another respect: the ads, despite (in some cases) their prodigious production budgets, seem to run only once or twice.
A new forecast from the UK advertising Association and data provider WARC says advertisers will spend a record £10.5bn (up from £9.7bn last year) over the Christmas season, but TV will actually be down 5% to £1.4bn.
Where’s it going? Search (which some might say isn’t advertising as knew it at all) is forecast to rise 9% to more than £4bn and online display ads, including social media, rising 15.8 per cent to just under £4bn.
Book as little expensive airtime as possible, get the PR and scatter the ad over YouTube and the like has become a tried and trusted formula but it prompts the question: has TV just become a fleeting shop window for big brands rather than a medium that delivers valuable brand building and (whisper it) sales? Successful ad campaigns used to be about coverage and frequency after all.
The big broadcasters, in this case ITV and Channel 4, don’t seem to help. Despite the noble efforts of TV marketing body Thinkbox the message from the two is, pretty consistently, that they wish they could get more of their money from streaming and the like. Ads almost seem an embarrassment.
Trouble is, they can’t. ITV’s latest numbers show a bigger than expected decline in ad sales, with ITV Studios, the programme-making arm, also having a tough time. C4 has seen an exodus of sales people at a time, presumably, when it should be out banging the drum.
Perhaps they really should switch to the Super Bowl strategy: charge the equivalent of $5m for one 30-second spot? No, don’t think that will work either.
