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One of the reasons that television is given so much importance as a medium to advertise with is because other media haven't
been researched and so it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy: Everyone uses TV so much that it has no choice but to bring in
the most success in advertising. Since the media plans don't change much from year to year, it isn't surprising that TV continues
to be the medium pushed to advertise above all others. There is also added mystique to television, something that most advertisers
fall for and why Randall Rothenberg has called advertising a branch of show business. Another reason for advertisers to like
television is that while they can run the same commercial multiple times to make up for the money spent on it, newspaper and
magazine advertising calls for multiple versions of a single advertisement (this mindset favors the agencies and not the clients).
Because so much money is spent on television, it also attracts the most research funds. Results from the Pure Single-Source
method suggested that overall effectiveness of TV advertisements were 40% (30% immediate sales and 10% maintaining of large
brands). It also found that a single exposure produces nearly all that effect and that although TV advertising is successful,
it is also selective in that the effectiveness depends on having the right campaign. Research done in Germany, Denmark, and
Norway and later in the US also found that a single magazine advertisement could have the same effect as television, but again,
the effectiveness relied on having the right campaign. Also, when figured out as financial return (how much was returned per
dollar), television performed the worst out of print, radio, and television even though advertisers seem to invest so much
money in it. They are willing to give up much more ads in other realms than TV because they believe that the ads given up
are intrinsically less valuable then the TV ads.
Another problem with the TV myth is that the purchasing power lies with the lighter-viewing homes, but the consumers getting
the bulk of the advertising are the heavier viewers, which will degrade the image of the brand, diminishing returns. Because
large advertisers concentrate so much of their budgets on TV, it's not surprising that sales results are weakening. The diminishing
returns have to do the most with the public being saturated with overall television presence (being at least turned on).
The best thing for advertisers to do would be cut back the total TV expenditure to 60% so it will match TV's coverage
of the population instead of 80% like it is now. Although TV will continue to be an important medium for large advertisers,
they would do well to use the chunk of expenditure they cut from TV on other forms of media like print, radio, or the Internet.
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