It’s become de rigueur for digital types to claim that traditional TV advertising is fast becoming obsolete. And they’re not entirely wrong. But they’re also not entirely right. Long and short, it’s complicated.

Doubtless, the industry — among them media companies, brands that’ve long counted on TV for needed reach and frequency, and big media buying agencies that’ve just as long counted on those brands’ ad dollars — is in flux.

Yes, there are some universal truths about TV advertising:

  1. Television’s role in the mix is primarily upper-funnel: awareness, brand building, and “priming the pump” of consumer demand. As a result, planning and buying with the still-prevalent lower-funnel mindset of digital is a mistake.
  2. TV still plays a primary role in people’s lives. People will always come home after a long day of work, have dinner, put their kids to bed, and want to relax for a couple of hours in front of a screen.

But major changes are obviously happening:

  1. New data sources and analytic techniques enable “TV attribution” — i.e., measuring sales at the campaign-, if not spot-, level while the campaign is in flight.
  2. TV is no longer just TV: Consumer adoption of streaming means that linear TV is a shrinking (though still large) part of their video diet. And with viewing on mobile devices and laptops as part of the mix, the form factor is an emerging question.

It was with all this in mind that my colleague Jim Nail and I decided to tackle the question: How does a brand use technology to help manage the process of planning, buying, optimizing, and measuring the performance of all of its video investments against its target audience(s) — whether on traditional linear broadcast, set-top-box-addressable, over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV), digital video, or all of the above?

Check out our resulting research, “The Forrester New Wave™: Cross-Channel Video Advertising Platforms, Q3 2019,” here to learn more.

Clients, feel free to reach out via inquiry to speak further with Jim and I on this.