TV Advertising Quotes

Following from O’berry & Cavanaugh, Marketing Consultants

McDonald's now devotes a third of its U.S. marketing budget to television, compared with two-thirds five years ago.

For marketers, the evolution from mass to micromarketing is a fundamental change driven as much by necessity as opportunity. America today is a far more diverse and commercially self-indulgent society than it was in the heyday of the mass market. The country has atomized into countless market segments defined not only by demography, but by increasingly nuanced and insistent product preferences. "All the research we're doing tells us that the driver of demand going forward is all about products that are 'right for me,"' says David Martin, president of Interbrand Corp. "And that's ultimately about offering a degree of customization for all."

At the same time, the almost-universal audience assembled long ago by network television and augmented by the other mass media is fragmenting at an accelerating rate. The mass media's decline is an old story in many respects; prime-time network ratings and newspaper circulation have been sliding since the 1970s. What's new is that the proliferation of digital and wireless communication channels is spreading the mass audience of yore ever-thinner across hundreds of narrowcast cable-TV and radio channels, thousands of specialized magazines, and millions of computer terminals, video-game consoles, personal digital assistants, and cell-phone screens. In the 1960s, an advertiser could reach 80% of U.S. women with a spot aired simultaneously on CBS (VIA ), NBC (GE ), and ABC (DIS ). Today, an ad would have to run on 100 TV channels to have a prayer of duplicating this feat. Adding a few Web sites would help, but not even the biggest new media conduits -- not Home Box Office, not Yahoo, not AOL (TWX ) Instant Messenger, not even