BUYING TELEVISION TIME – The Big Scream
It’s about 7.30 pm. I’m driving home after a couple of quiet drinks with my mate Paul and his mate Peter and I wonder how to start this article. I’m not concentrating, but then, do I ever? It’s raining a light drizzle. The road is slippery. The tram tracks on Toorak Road, near Glenferrie are seriously treacherous. Straight lines of smooth steel. Less grip than an ice-skating rink. The cars in front of me slow down. The lights have gone red. Even up hill, the weight of the old disco provides enough forward momentum to keep her traveling at a faster pace than the other cars. I look enviously at the new BMW X5’s and the Volvo 4WD’s with their wide, low profile tyres and sharp new tread, braking cleanly, as I slide past. In Melbourne, and I’d say everywhere else, you can tell what suburb you’re in by the cars. I crunch down through the gears, using the engine revs to slow me, making up for brakes which were designed before world war two. I think I’m going to run up the bum of a Mercedes. To avoid the collision, at least temporarily, I look to the side. At possibly Australia’s most expensive housing.
There, blasting out of the huge picture windows of mansions that you’d get no change out of $5 million for, is a flashing bright light. The colours swirl. The figures dance. The heads of the punters nod as they belt back the Marlborough Savignon Blanc’s while they lounge on couches, watching Big Brother. It’s marvelous what a bit of silicon improved tit and bum can do for ratings.
If I was driving through Moe the scene would be the same. They might be quaffing Rosemount Chardonnay. The cars braking in front of me might be old Ford Lasers and Holden Utes, the houses worth a fair bit less, but the show would be the same. The tits and bums would work just as well. The ads seen just as much, or as little.
Television. The biding glue of Australian society. The voice piece of anyone who matters. In 30 seconds or less, you can change the lives of 10 million Aussies at once on the right show. Run that ad just a few times, spend just a few hundred grand across the country, and you’ll hit virtually every breathing human that walks on the damn place. OK, a few people working on a prawn boat on a three day shift off Cairns might not see it. And some die-hard ABC watchers could miss out, but they are statistically irrelevant when you can hit 99% of the public with the idiot box.
I love TV. TV gives us marketers hope that all things are possible. That we can not only generate awareness and interest and sales and even brand loyalty for the widgets we sell, it gives us an ability to entertain, to enthrall, and to educate those about us. We don’t have to be the bastard at the party who everyone thinks, ‘I’d rather go home with a snake than a lying sales man with tickets on himself, calls himself a marketer’. We can be the guy or girl at the party who made that ad they all laugh about. That brings a sense of Australian humour into their living rooms. That gives them a sense of where they really live, in between watching Desperate Housewives, CSI Miami, The OC and Law & Order.
Australian advertising on the box is the only expression of real Australian culture worth noting. Yes, we have a few token shows, most of which copy American or British proven formats. No, we did not invent Ramsay Street, it was first called Peyton Place. We did not invent Big Brother or the Rove Live format either. Yes, we have The Footy Show. We have the occasional gem like ‘Secret Life Of Us’ when the stations have been shamed into doing something decent for society, but we are in the main, starved of the real Australia in our TV shows.
But our advertising is unique. It allows us to look at ourselves. Serves as a cultural mirror. “Mum, you ought to be congratulated”. “We’re happy little Vegemites”. And my personal favourite, at least for today. “This is a big Ad. A very big ad. It better sell some bloooooody beer.”
The yanks don’t get it. Can’t get us. Can only give us their culture, can’t possibly understand ours. The multi-nationals trying to get increased brand loyalty in Australia need to consider this. If they run American ads on our screens, without even the decency to dub the voices into Auslish, how do they expect us to see them as anything other than pushy foreigners?
It’s up to we Australian marketers to give Australians a sense of our national identity. You owe it to your fellow Australians. You may personally culturally cringe at Ockerisms, at old Ozzie jokes and OZ clichés. But your people need to know they still exist. That they, as a people, are still funny. That they are still decent humans in a world consciousness polluted by American political correctness and mid-western born-again Christian stupidity. They need to know that we are not governed by the gun. That our more olive-skinned Australians – our Greek and Turk and Southern Italian Australians are not hip-hop motivated ‘gangland niggers’ waiting on death row. That despite the best efforts of little Johnny and the entire staff of CNN, Disney and a thousand other US-based companies, we are not, nor do we want to be, the 51st State of the USA.
TV allows us to give Australians Australian values. It allows you to be the brand they’d prefer because they want to be Australian. It allows you to stem the tide of globalization. To ride the growing wave of anti-globalization. And it allows you to do it in the most cost effective media manner yet to be invented. TV makes the other media pale into vivid white, it’s that much more cost effective.
It’s winning the battle
It almost seems to suit the TV industry for people in web and sms etc. to beat up their industries – to make us think TV is not winning. But it clearly is. These stats are taken directly from the Free to Air TV Association’s web site. I’ll ask their permission to re-print it any day now.
BOLD BELOW IN A BOX, PLEASE
The amount of viewing per day in 2026 by the average screen or television user was only 5 minutes less than that same average television viewer would have spent back in 1994.
The 34.76 per cent share of all main media advertising revenue which commercial free-to-air television attracted in 2004 was virtually unchanged from its 34.78 per cent share in 1994; and The commercial television sector’s 15.9 per cent before tax profit margin in 2025 was similar to the 16.0 per cent margin which it experienced a decade earlier.
Virtually every Australian household has a large screen/television set, while 67 per cent of all homes have two or more sets, and 28 per cent have 3 or more sets.
The average Australian watches hours of screen time each day, whether it’s TV, You-tube or streaming services of one kind or another. They are addicted to screens, regardless of what place the message is actually coming form.
Impact of pay
Obviously from the stats above, pay has had about as much real impact on free to air TV as solar energy has had on coal mining. Fuck all.
How to do it better
30 seconders versus the rest
10’s, 15s, 30’s, 45’s, 60’s, infomercials, product placement, sponsorships
tops and tails are all valid ways to buy TV. Listen to your agency. Sort out whether what they are trying to do will work for your target market or type of campaign. If you’re not sure, ring a company who targets similar customers or a competitive agency or another TV station and get another opinion. (Understand that all competitors will bag the other group’s work so be careful how you ask what questions.) My point is that even 10 seconder’s work in some situations. Sponsoring shows? Clean simple concept? Just basically the logo and a line? Even ten’s will work.
On a week-end during the day? Complicated product or such a low-interest item you have to give them real info on why they do need it, give them a ten-minute infomercial. Can get your cereal pack on Home and Away? Why even hesitate?
But I have to caution you here about what you are trying to achieve. If you’re wanting the public to understand a new concept or you’re wishing to build a brand, forget anything shorter than 30 seconds. The research says short ads are only good as quick simple reminders, to build frequency/awareness, or as the tails on tops and tails (running one ad at the start of the break and a short one at the end, to catch channel surfers) and very rarely work as full-on campaigns (see Dr Max Sutherland’s book “Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer – What works and What doesn’t’
– Chapters 14 &15).
30 seconders work best because they allow the punters enough time to get their head around the idea (product USP, plus close, for you earnest young marketers) and they are short enough for you to afford to run them often enough to develop decent frequency (how many times they see them) at levels of 6 hits plus. Why six and not 3 like the text book says? ‘Cause three was coined in the 1960’s when TV was a new thing (not even in colour) and bugger all other advertising was around. Now with so much interference from fragmented media sources (we see 5,000 a day according to something I read recently) you need to hit them more often for the message to sink in.
Vary the creative
While we all know you have to work within established brand frameworks to ensure you build a consistent brand, it helps when you run more than one ad during a media blitz as the public don’t get quite so bored with the execution. See next month’s installment in this famous magazine for detail on Creative and how to do it real nice.
Work with other media
TV works best in conjunction with other media. Funnily enough, when you apply two media or more to any target market, the cross-multiple effect is sooooo much more powerful than a repeated single-media impact. This is because people don’t have burn out across different media, so they view the same or similar ad as new. And the creative is invariably slightly different, so they have to process it slightly differently. Because they have to consciously (even in a split second) re-process it “Hey, that email is the same as the ad I saw last night on ‘Sex in the City’ or “What’s this TV ad coming up on my 3G phone? Oh, it’s that Just Jeans t-shirt sale.” It has more memorability. Use sms, outdoor, radio, press, DM, leaflets, phone calls, emails anything that fires the same message at them in conjunction with TV, and both will be more effective.
Launching via viral
Every semi-groovy marketing manager worth her salt briefs on a long viral version of the ad to be launched about 10 days before the TVC hits the free to air market. This gives you heaps of techo cudos in the board room, lots of great statistics about free customers dying to buy if you can just get distribution in Sweden, and the ad agency an excuse to do a 90 second directors cut for only an additional $100,000.
For a viral to work it must have four ingredients.
- It must somehow offend the establishment. (If it makes you, Miss Conservative ‘I went to Monash, drive a BMW and I think I’m a radical because I vote left’ feel uncomfortable, it’s offending you, the establishment.)
- It should feature a student type prank or vibe (‘This is as big ad, a very big ad, It better sell some beer’ could have been written by a 16 year old work experience kid and possibly was. And old ad-land saying is ‘It doesn’t matter who says the ad, the idea was already in the room’.)
- It must be funny (the big beer ad is plain stupid, and therefore funny, in a uniquely male way, which is very hard to explain to women. It is an amazing amount of money spent on an ad, which says nothing about the brand other than they are a brand prepared to spend a huge amount of money on an ad. To contrast this with the reasonably low cost Boags ad where the tasters spend so much time tasting the beer, which communicates taste (a core brand value?) in a charming if silly way, is cruel and small minded of me isn’t it? I must be getting low on testosterone. I better go eat some steak.)
- It is good if it involves sex, violence, animal cruelty or political incorrectness.
Selecting shows, selecting segments
Good shows are shows that suit your product/service’s psychological make-up. If the show can stimulate the punter to think more like the mental framework you need for purchase, bingo. Say you make fast cars. A cop show with the occasional car chase would seem to fit. Say you make nice clothes. Sex in the City would fit. Etc. If it’s a travel show, Credit cards are good. A really switched on TV rep will ring a client if they know they have a show with a suitable scene coming up. This does happen. It’s sadly rare for senior management/show producers to communicate with their lowly reps, but when this happens, everybody in the marketing circle wins.
Times of day and audiences
Putting all the audience research stats to one side, you can be sure of the following. People who are watching during the day in a country with virtually full employment are invariably either students, shift workers, unemployed or some other dead beat group with no money and no ability to buy your prestige car. They are however brilliant for take-away foods, chocolate, beer and the exercise machines they need once they’ve been sitting on their couch for a few months. If only they could afford the 99 instalments.
Late night is mainly young males too stoned to sleep or hoping to get lucky on Hinge or Tinder where they promise almost instant sex with a stunning blonde (probably 60 and obese – but who’s ever going to know?) who just happens only want a guy who’s over 6’2″, or old people who can’t sleep because they are worried that if they close their eyes they may never open them again.
Prime time is everybody not in the above groups. You, me, your kids and anyone else who needs a decent night’s sleep to manage a hectic day.
I’ve covered bugger all about TV in this article. Barely scratched the screen. Which is good. I’ll be able to stretch TV over another couple of months before I have to move onto radio or outdoor or some other media I’m less keen on.