MONTREAL – People who say TV and radio are dead because new digital media have taken their place are lying to you.
That was the rather blunt message delivered at the CBC Media Forum, a gathering of advertising and marketing professionals that took place Wednesday in Montreal and repeats Thursday in Toronto.
Invited speakers used statistics and plenty of swear words to make the point that despite all the buzzwords and hype surrounding digital media and online advertising, traditional mass marketing is still the most effective way of reaching an audience.
“We marketers are taught not to think simply… thinking simply has been beaten out of us,” explained Bob Hoffman, author of 101 Contrarian Ideas about Advertising. “Consumers are simple creatures with straightforward needs.”
Among Hoffman’s points: that more than 98% of retail purchases are not done using smartphones, that only 0.07% of people ever engage with a brand on Facebook, that 96% of all video viewing is on a television screen, and 83% of households subscribe to pay TV. His figures are for the United States, but they’re not much different from Canada. CRTC data shows 82% of Canadian households subscribe to cable, satellite or IPTV service.
Hoffman (pictured) took the opportunity to mock predictions from a decade ago that haven’t come to pass, such as the one in 2004 that we were at the end of mass marketing, or in 2005 that we had seen the end of the 30-second ad, or in 2008 that traditional advertising was over.
“I guess someone forgot to tell Apple that,” he replied to each of them, pointing out that at Apple itself, the “overwhelming majority of advertising is done on non-digital media.”
And the man who describes himself online as the “Ad Contrarian” says we’re getting demographics wrong too, 
and people over 50 are vastly undervalued as a target audience even though they consume much more than younger people. “People 75-to-dead buy six times as many new cars as Americans 18-24,” he said.
Hoffman isn’t against new media or technology, and he acknowledges the effectiveness of things like search engine ads. “The Internet is a powerful medium for everyone,” he said. “Social media has been a worldwide phenomenon, but social marketing has been a disappointment.”
“No one is smarter than the facts.” – Bob Hoffman
Simply put, Hoffman puts more trust in facts than buzz. “No one is smarter than the facts,” he said.
Supporting his point was Mark Ritson, a branding professor at the University of Melbourne. He took a now textbook case of online marketing — a tweet by Oreo during a power outage at the 2013 Super Bowl — and turned it on its head by calculating its reach using realistic assumptions of click through rates. A memorable TV ad by Budweiser, he concludes, was probably seen by a thousand times as many people, but hype machines online declared the Oreo ad to have “won” the Super Bowl.
Ritson also looked at the top 10 brands in Canada (the big five banks, the big three telecom companies, Enbridge and McCain Foods), and showed that their social media presence reaches only a tiny fraction of their consumer base, and less than one per cent of their consumers engage with them online. One in 2,500 Canadians engage with one of the top 10 brands on a weekly basis, he estimates.
Hoffman and Ritson have their critics (doesn’t everyone?), and one might raise an eyebrow that the CBC brought in experts who say we need to pay more attention to traditional media. But their main points – that buzz should be kept in perspective and different forms of media evaluated dispassionately – are good to keep in mind, whether you think social ads are the future or not.
