Last week’s financial market roller coaster is so far not affecting fall TV upfront buys, which are due to convert to orders in late August/early September. MediaPost reports that media agency leaders aren’t seeing any signs of adjustments to the TV upfront buys and expect Q4 to remain strong despite economic uncertainty. Steve Lanzano, president/CEO of the TV station association TVB says, “Back-to-school consumer spending should provide a good barometer for retail spending in the upcoming holiday season . . . But at this time it is not expected that planned advertising spending will be affected."

This attention to the TV market reflects its continued advertising power position. Despite frequent proclamations of TV’s demise, the fall 2011 TV upfronts showed that it remains the go-to media for many advertisers. What is new, though, are signs that nascent TV and digital convergence is now being led by the ad sellers themselves. TV networks like Fox and The CW are following their consumers to multiscreen viewing by offering integrated video ad deals that span on-air and online. What does this mean for marketers? To stay connected with their consumers, marketers must get off of the couch and out of the living room to reach consumers through and beyond linear TV programming. Check out my report “The 2011 TV Advertising Upfronts Preview Convergence Of TV And Digital” to learn more about how these trends will affect brand marketers. 

Brand marketers don’t spend much online. It’s been a long-time frustration for me, but it’s undeniably true: According to our most recent interactive marketing forecast, marketers in brand categories spend less than half as much of their marketing budgets online as marketers in direct response categories. Brand marketers also continue to spend a huge portion of their marketing budgets on TV.

I’ll be honest: Five or 10 years ago, this made sense. Although lot of us were shouting from the rooftops back in 2000 about the scale and power of the Internet, the truth is back then its scale and power were relatively limited. The majority of the population still wasn’t online, Internet usage averaged only a few hours per week, and the brand stories we could tell online were constrained by both tiny banner ads (anyone remember "half banners"?) and tiny bandwidth (broadband access, and with it online video and other rich creative, was years away from the mainstream).

In that environment, it made sense that TV was by far marketers’ most important channel for building brand. After all, it offered brand marketers by far the largest media opportunity (more total users, and way more total hours, than any other media channel) and by far the richest brand impact of any platform. Marketers would have had little choice even if they wanted it: 30-second TV spots were the be-all and end-all of how they explained the meaning of the brands, and all other channels — online, radio, print, outdoor, and everything else — were simply a chance to reinforce the messaging in the TV spots.

But the conditions that made TV the de facto heart of our brand messaging no longer exist. Today, interactive marketing is ready to lead your brand campaigns, for four key reasons:

If you read this blog, you likely already care less about the Saints versus the Colts than you do about Super Bowl ads versus Social Media marketing. After all, the real money isn't earned from the battle on the field but in the battle that occurs during timeouts: Each player on last year's winning team earned a bonus of $83,000 while NBC earned around $213 million in ad revenue for the telecast.

A shift is occurring in the relative importance to marketers of Social Media and Super Bowl advertising.  Of course, the 2010 Super Bowl isn't the first we've seen of the marriage of Social Media and Super Bowl ads. Last year, Doritos struck gold with a UGC (User-Generated Content) ad produced by two unemployed brothers, and the brand is back this year with more UGC ads competing for even greater prize money.

Image by yewenyivia Flickr

...(Subtitled) Or at Least Marketing as We Know It!

But first, since this is my first blog post as a Forrester analyst, I thought I'd make a quick introduction.  I'm Augie Ray, a new Sr. Analyst of Social Computing serving interactive marketing professionals.  Prior to joining Forrester's Bay Area office, I was a Managing Director at Fullhouse, a social and interactive communications agency in Milwaukee, WI.  I'm very excited to be part of the Forrester organization and eager to help clients with research, data, and consulting on the profound and exciting changes underway with Social Media Marketing.