In the advertising business one hears a lot of talk about the “three screens”: television, the Internet, and mobile devices. These are seen as the main avenues by which advertisers can get to their intended audience. But among these three screens, which of them dominates and gives the most benefits for an advertising video?
According to Randall Stross, major ad agencies led him back again and again to television. “This is not only because it remains the one place where an advertiser can gather a truly mass audience for a single commercial message but because it provides what advertisers call an ‘immersive experience,’” says Stross.
Stross points out that we used to speak of reading a book as an immersive experience but now the term seems to be shorthand for video on a screen. People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention.
The average American household consists of 2.7 persons and contains 2.9 television sets, in front of which the typical American watches up to 142 hours of television monthly, according to Nielsen figures. Internet use, on the other hand, averaged more than 27 hours monthly with 31 percent of Internet use occurring in while watching television. People are also taking an interest in watching videos on their phones. There are about 100 million handsets which are video capable worldwide. Advertising videos take a great part of the videos that they watch over television, the Internet and their mobile devices.
As a result of our continuing love affair with our screens, print media has taken a hit as subscribers to print newspapers have gone missing and book publishers are wondering where readers have gone to. Stross speculates that a tipping point has been passed in the competition between screen and screen that has been underway since the beginning of broadcast TV and now continues with video and other media.
The aforementioned statistics from Nielsen seem to indicate that people prefer the passive attention needed when engaging during a TV show or viewing a video than print and text formats. Are people getting lazier? Stross thinks not. It’s just that text is now so infrequently used that people are starting to view it as a burden. Well, that may certainly be true for users in the advertising world. A user will not make the effort to understand and read text format advertisements particularly when it is unsolicited. A well made advertising video definitely keeps the attention of viewers more surely than a nicely turned phrase.
