Buying Time

摘要

There will still be commercials every 12 minutes or so for a long time to come. But the agencies buying spots are beginning to think the television advertising model is a waste of time and money. "They're beginning to lose confidence in the medium," confides Ray Warren, managing director of OMD USA, the largest TV buying agency in North America, about his peers in the ad business. Rapid acceleration of new technologies such as digital video recorders and video-on-demand, coupled with questionable audience-research practices, have marketers fundamentally rethinking the way they look at TV as a part of their advertising mix. Still, television advertising spending continues to rise—but that's mainly because new categories of advertisers are filling the time with commercials for products or services that either didn't exist before or didn't advertise. That's found money that won't always be there.