A SCREEN TO BE RECKONED WITH
LIKE A STAND-UP comic taking his show from town to town, Mark Ritson, adjunct professor of marketing at the Melbourne Business School, took to the stage at a MediaWorks presentation in February to deliver one of his favourite gags, a muted two seconds of Gone with The Wind across half the screen. The point being that in the digital world, videos are reduced to practically nothing, with views counted as watching for two seconds. How can that compete with TV, he asks? To him, it can’t.
In the past year, both Ritson and Bob Hoffman, AKA The Ad Contrarian, have visited New Zealand, thanks to MediaWorks and TVNZ, arguing that the reverence marketers and agencies have for digital is misplaced and that TV remains very much alive here and around the world. And while there’s no doubt digital is growing and there’s more content vying for attention, any argument that TV is dead is, according to Ritson, “a total and utter misrepresentation of the truth”.
And that truth becomes clear when considering 3.5 million New Zealanders aged 5+ watch TV each week and of those viewers, the average time spent watching broadcast TV is nearly three hours a day. Putting that into a percentage, that’s 84 percent of New Zealanders being reached every week by live and time-shifted TV.
Besides the TV set, Nielsen data shows the most popular devices for watching video content across a week are desktops/laptops with 39 percent of New Zealanders aged 10+ using them a
