Advertisers Tuning Out TV in Sign of Trouble for Media Companies | Hacker News Reader

Advertisers Tuning Out TV in Sign of Trouble for Media Companies

bloomberg.com

46 pointsprostoalex53 comments

I don't see why people think that having TV and traditional media die out is a good thing. Major internet news and entertainment sources are not only as biased, but also capable of colnsealing it very well. Personalized propaganda is a nightmare we see raising. People living in the same household are so disconnected because they get completely different news coverage for the same events. Most content on the internet isn't of better quality either.

10 years ago I would never expect saying this, but old media (TV, printed newpapers etc) are now more reliable than internet-delivered content. At least TV and printed newspapers can't change history by making edits in their articles and videos after publishing them.

This feels similar (but not the same!) as the "vaccines cause autism" argument.

Perhaps the news was never that reliable it's just easier to see unreliable news now?

It could also be that everyone got the same bias previously so it seemed more coherent. Now that stories are spun to our personal biases we individually see more sides and so things seem less coherent?

> This feels similar (but not the same!) as the "vaccines cause autism" argument.

Except that it isn't similar at all.

The news may not have been reliable and may have always had a propaganda element in it (especially when it came to things like war coverage, royal families and so on), but it was a reasonably known quantity. The 'weaponization' of news and the horizontal interconnects between people facilitating the formation of cliques and echo chambers is as far as I can see a historically unprecedented affair.

The degree to which this is responsible for the current polarization of entire societies is something that will be studied for a long time, the 'vaccines cause autism' argument is for the most part limited to the fringes rather than that it expands at the speed of light to all corners of our (global!) society.

> horizontal interconnects between people facilitating the formation of cliques and echo chambers is as far as I can see a historically unprecedented affair

To give mechanism to your effect, microtargetting an audience has never been possible before the way it is today. You can assemble an in-group audience of millions before anyone outside even notices you exist. That jeapordises traditional fact-checking mechanisms.

But was there any real guarantee that "old media" was more reliable? Weren't we just getting one view of the world which we assumed was true?

I agree, personalized propaganda is a nightmare.

With the old media everyone got the same story. It wasn't assumed to be true, because you knew who was saying this (it's hard for a large newpaper to hide their political affiliation), and the news piece was judged by other reporters on different papers and people you personally knew. Since you all were getting the same news, you could discuss them and argue about their validity. Now this just doesn't happen. Everyone gets a different news feed, which partly is the reason we need comment sections so much. And comment sections and forums were ok before the widespread use of mass censoring based on NLP or manual identification of political bias, pre-fabricated conversations, selective de-ranking and all other kinds of trickery. Simply put, it used to be that internet content was purely the result of individual personal effort, so there was something to trust behind every article, because you knew that someone was putting effort into it and getting almost nothing material in return. Now the validity of news pieces only boils down to trust, and I trust the established media more than random strangers and small companies trying to make a quick buck, because the established media can't hide lying and they have something to lose, their trustworthingness and billions of dollars. The same cannot be said for anonymous or pseudomymous internet companies that for all you know were created yesterday and will vanish tomorrow or after the next elections perhaps.

Well, part of that depends on your definitions of "new" and "old" media.

Some things can be readily compared - easy to compare the Washington Post of today to Washington Post of the 1970s.

But many of today's subreddits, facebook pages and 4chan boards don't have a direct equivalent in the 1970s.

Comparing 1970s WaPo vs 2018 WaPo will give you a different result to comparing 1970s WaPo vs (2018 WaPo + r/LateStageCapitalism + r/The_Donald)

> But many of today's subreddits, facebook pages and 4chan boards don't have a direct equivalent in the 1970s.

I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter ()!

But seriously, The Birth of a Nation came out somewhat before r/RarePepes. Michael Moore films also (barely) predate social media. And people were reading about JFK assassination conspiracies and fake moon landings way before "new" media was around.

() The equivalent to a niche social media group was subscribing to a niche political newsletter.

> printed newspapers can't change history by making edits in their articles and videos after publishing them

That's a bad thing. At least when you are reading Washington Posts online article about the russian hack of the US power grid it says: "Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid."

In old media, people would still believe it was russian goverment hacking. Now it backfired in the online world and "fake news".

The record that a correction was made only exists if all involved parties wants it to. If the publisher/government/Google/ISP etc. has malicious intent, they could make changes silently and pretend as if nothing happened.

At least with newspapers, the physical copy of the previous version will always exist (barring the implementation of totalitarian government and 1984-style memory holes, of course).

This is a actual use for blockchain that we could put into action pretty much whenever we can decide to.

Or just, you know, a cache.

This, the ability for people controlling the media to change history, is why archive.org was created. Do think about them when you contribute to "charities", even a few dollars per year goes a long way.

Assuming that sites don't block archiving (Vice and its sub-brands like Motherboard were doing this quite aggressively for a while, so there's basically no public record of what their articles used to say), and assuming the Internet Archive themselves can't be convinced to remove the archived copies.

Disagree.

We're worse off, specifically because of that.

Who's following the updates of the articles they read? Very few, much fewer than the already few who are reading in the first place.

No, the "mislead and correct after the news cycle" thing is most certainly not an improvement. It might have been different...

Further to your point, traditional publications used to publish redactions in subsequent publications. Granted they weren't typically in prominent positions; but still more likely to get seen by readers of the original article than online media where readers are unlikely to revisit an article after reading.

As for whether we're better or worse off, I don't think we're either. On the one hand people who are interested in the true can more easily investigate it. But on the other hand those that aren't are more easily deceived. Sadly the net average is the latter rather than the former but frankly people will generally sway towards the "truths" that fall more in line with their preconceptions anyway. So the problem could be argued as a wider social / psychological issue rather than one directly related to a change in the way news is consumed.

I don't know how the media landscape looks in other countries, but in Denmark actual news on TV is basically non-existing. There are news programming scheduled, but they often lack actual news content.

Danish TV2 for instance have a "30 minute" news program at 19:00. It consist of a short news summary (3 minutes), one main story (around 7 minutes), 5 minutes for "other news items". 5 minutes for weather and 5 minutes for an "inspirational" story, which would be more fitting for an evening talkshow.

There aren't real news broadcasts left on TV any more. I don't think that TV necessarily should die out, but the TV stations are slowly making themself less relevant by focusing on more, but cheaper content, rather than scaling down. Do you really need to run six channels, when you only have content for 2 or 3?

Maybe your experience is unique to Denmark. It's the opposite here in India. There are infinite number of 24 hour news channels in every language you can imagine.

That may very well be. We do have one 24 hour news channel, but they have very little actually news.

Local TV news is not the type of linear streaming that is dying. The stuff that is dying is the stuff that works better as streaming such as prime time dramas.

I tend to spend a lot of time these days providing advice for those installing TV antennas. People often get a TV antenna as part of the process of getting rid of cable. Local TV news is the number one reason that anyone bothers to work to get access to broadcast linear video streams.

Like with many technological revolutions, the old thing will probably not go away entirely, but will contract into the niches where it is most valuable.

Exactly this, Personalised content is actually promoting the thoughts irrespective if they are right or wrong.

And people increasingly tend to believe that what they are thinking is indeed right. Because they see/read the articles on the internet which act as a validation for their thoughts.

TV ad sales fell 7.8% last year. If ad sales continue to decline at that rate, in 10 years this market will be only 44% of its current size.

I'm seriously shocked that the numbers are still that high. I might be an outlier, but I haven't watch "TV" in more than 10 years, and a lot of people around me are the same.

We went from TV to an increase in DVD rentals, to Netflix, and now more and more to just rent movies from google etc...

As people are more ready to pay for entertainment rather than put up with ads, what worries me is the shift in to more insidious form of ads such as product placement.

> a lot of people around me are the same

Anytime you find yourself saying this, it's worth exploring how your own experiences might be biasing your judgement.

Recent research in the UK for example shows a much more nuanced view of the changes in TV viewing behaviour: https://www.thinkbox.tv/Research/Nickable-Charts/Killer-Char...

The ROI on TV ad spend is practically incalculable so is it any surprise that advertisers would rather invest in channels where (almost) all spend is trackable?

Brand and also for self promation doing a major tv add like say the John Lewis xmass one or the Merkats and coming up with the concept for a major advert "go to work on an egg", I actually vaguely know the guy that came up with that one.

This all looks very good on a markeing persons CV "simples"

It's not surprising, but it is naive. There is very little marketing training or institutional knowledge (particularly in the tech sector) which leads to a natural bias to what is easiest to measure.

Typically the stuff we would find easiest to measure has been called 'direct response' marketing, which is just one subset of marketing communications.

Any credible marketer will be creating plans that balance both short term and long term advertising effects.

The most up to date research on this: http://www.ipa.co.uk/page/The-Long-and-the-Short-of-It-publi...

That's not exactly true. TV attribution is actually getting very good these days, especially if you're equipped with a large pool of phone numbers/coupon-codes and a way to segment those numbers/codes in your ads.

TV advertising isn't exactly "dying" either. Personal injury law firms are actually finding TV advertising _more_ effective in this climate and are spending more money in it, filling the void left by other advertisers. That's even as they're increasing their digital ad spend.

(NB: Until recently, I worked in AdTech/MarTech for a large personal injury law firm.)

Why? If you are injured you are probably stuck at home watching TV (or hospital TV with basic channels)?

Yep, I'm seeing a lot of my competitors running these more often now. I work a few with law firms primarily handling development and online advertising/marketing. I've done print as well, but been dying to get into making tv and radio commercials as the clients have requested it. I struggle because for the ad buy itself is hard to find someone good to work with. It's a bunch of middle-men. Everything is segmented. I also really dislike the lack of hard figures and live data so it's difficult to give up that control.

Not to mention the commitment seems to be quite expensive. I can spend a few grand on Adwords and then turn it off the next month if I really needed to. It'll be amazing when I can make produce commercials and upload them to a platform that then airs on cable TV reporting back statistics.

You not only have to build your own attribution pipeline on the web & call side, but you need to pay for both Nielsen reports and Google Attribution 360.

Basically you need to either be a large company or an agency with clients that have deep pockets. We had to hire a fulltime TV buying person who had experience working with all of the relevant parties in our market.

Our yearly ad spend, all totaled, was somewhere around $100mil/yr.

Yikes, yeah that's the thing. That's so beyond any of my clients budgets. I've been pushing to do other things including billboards since I spend a majority of my time these days working on online advertising and seo which has had a wonderful ROI (putting the time in to get proper conversion tracking and funnels has been a treat) and keeping doors open but I want to take it to the next level for both personal growth and peeling back the curtain.

Plus, video production is something I did in the past so doing more of that could be exciting even if it's bland lawyer commercials for Judge Judy. $100mil/yr is a dream. Definitely get a sense of jealousy when I see other firms showing up on TV.

The model seems to be to land some whale client who will pay you enough to get it and then you use it for all of your clients.

That will work for Nielsen ($100k/yr!) but likely not for Google.

Yeah that definitely seems to be the play. I didn't realize how much these were, I just looked at google attribution 360 that seems fantastic to use. I viewed the Nest video of how they are using it. I don't know if I could ever get any of these lawyers to that point though. I work with newer and smaller firms. I really enjoy the aspect of helping people grow from very little - I just have a lot less money to play with but I can dictate where it goes, pick any technology stack, etc.

I get that advertising is effective by scale. You're more likely to choose something you've heard of. But I still can't help but feeling resentful for a company when they're out to steal my time and attention.

> steal my time and attention.

Is all unsolicited incoming communication such "stealing"?

Unsolicited communication is generally referred to as spam. Spam is generally considered bad because of the demands it makes of you, cognitive and resource-related. So the answer to your question is of course.

But it's usually a price you willingly pay in exchange for a service. You gave your email out to get something in return. You're seeing those ads because you want to read something else on the website. You've entered into a transaction where receiving advertising is an implicit trade you've made to get something else.

I don't know about you, but I've never entered my email in exchange for anything knowing I'd get spam.

At the very least the transaction is unfair since the spam part is generally left very implicit.

An implicit trade that’s becoming more and more irrelevant as advertisers become more and more disrespectful of my time and attention. They were ramping up on the distraction long before ad blocking and skipping were widely used.

Yes. Thankfully companies aren't free to sell my data to the highest bidder so my phone number and email are not public for every salesman to use.

Unfortunately companies I do business with are allowed to try to sell me things. But the Outlook spam filter is pretty good.

Then saw this study this morning done

"“TV ad research finds sales impact of TV outperforms Facebook and YouTube”

https://mediaweek.com.au/benchmark-tv-karen-nelson-field/

Kind of curious did this come out intentionally right now?

There has been a lot of research into this topic over the past couple of years. Particularly as the effectiveness of digital advertising & ad tech are under increasing pressure.

I haven't used Hulu since they phased out the free tier, but I see in the article that Hulu generates $1bn in advertising sales per year. Do you still have to watch ads on the paid tiers?

Yeah, the paid tiers still contain ads.

The base streaming tier is $8/month and contains ads. The next tier up is $12 and has no ads.

$12 tier has limited ads.

of course tv ads become more profitable with more of the proactive, thinking populace moving to more modern ways to consume like Netflix or Amazon. What's left is more and more the passive people that are more easily influenced by suggestions coming from ads.

This however is not a long term growth strategy. It's more like the last bump up before everything falls down. If I had a way to bet 6-7 digit amounts of money against tv I would do so right now.

It's a bold claim that Netflix & Amazon customers are more proactive & 'thinking' than others. Or that TV viewers are more passive & more easily influenced.

The claim of 'influence' is probably worth exploring: How does advertising work? What does it mean to influence someone?

Do you remember the news that insurers found Hotmail users are more likely to get into auto accidents and raised their rates? Hotmail users are people who haven't bothered to a superior service for over 10 years. I would not be surprised if those same people still exclusively watch TV instead of streaming

All that the Hotmail story really highlighted was the reliance on inductive reasoning by actuaries. It also didn't make clear whether they had identified drivers who caused accidents or had been the victims of accidents. Insurers will penalise people who make claims regardless of fault.

It's not a particularly useful comparison for this situation.

Also when 'people who watch broadcast TV' represent an overwhelming majority, the suggestion that they're essentially a bit stupid is well... rather arrogant, no?

I guess that is why I am seeing so many random ads on tv for “youth hormones” and other weird scam products.

They'll be back with ATSC 3.0 and targeted advertising.

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