Minneapolis advertising agency Marketing Architects doesn’t draw any line between linear television and streaming services – it’s all just telly, its chief marketing officer Elena Jasper tells Dentsu’s Dave Winterlich.
Given that TV’s demise has been predicted since the dawn of the internet, it’s a refreshing take.
But at least part of the reason TV is so easily dismissed as a sunset industry is because, to digital natives, linear TV is something their parents watch – and the marketing industry is disproportionately young, points out Winterlich.
“That is a huge contributor to why TV suffers from so much bias, especially linear television,” agrees Jasper.
“A lot of it comes from statements I hear all the time, such as ‘well, I don’t watch linear TV’ or ‘my audience doesn’t watch it’, coming from marketers and agency employees. We sometimes think our media habits apply to the rest of the world and the rest of consumers, but they don’t,” she says.
In fact, in the United States, linear TV still accounts for 90 per cent of ad-supported viewing on a TV screen, she points out.
“So yes, viewership has changed. But this year, 2025, is going to be the first year that social media and YouTube viewership inch out linear TV viewership – and only barely. I guarantee that if you asked the average marketer, whatever country you are from globally, I don’t think they would predict those statistics,” says Jasper.
“It’s still the most powerful marketing channel, in my opinion, because even as linear starts to lose viewership, that viewership is going to streaming. So the channel is still highly effective, it just suffers from bias. TV isn’t dying, it’s evolving, and has been for a long time.”
TV might best be considered as simply hardware, suggests Winterlich, given that it is the medium through which both linear and streamed programming are so often watched.
“It definitely needs to be reframed. It’s video content you can access on a television screen,” agrees Japser. “The lines are blurring between cable, streaming and digital video, which is why the linear versus streaming debate is kind of silly. To the average consumer, it’s just TV.”
It’s a view backed up by Marketing Architects’ research, which found that consumers define TV as anything they can watch on a TV set, and that campaigns that integrate streaming with linear perform better than those that focus on just one or the other.
“As marketers we should just be looking at how we can reach people in the most efficient and effective way,” she adds.
Its research also puts paid to notions of what constitutes the “golden age” of TV, which some suggest has passed and others believe we are living through. “Our surveys show it follows generational lines. Whatever you were growing up watching on TV, that was, to you, the golden age,” she explains.
The ability to mix linear and streaming provides agencies with greater flexibility in terms of how they buy TV and allows more advertisers to participate. It can also be tracked better.
On top of that, TV also benefits from big events, typically live sporting ones, that still draw enormous crowds. In the US events such as the Super Bowl “are some of the only opportunities available to marketers where a lot of people are watching your brand”, Jasper points out, referring to it as cultural imprinting.
“It helps to grow your brand in a way that digital marketing just can’t,” she says.
“So if you are ruling out TV or video because you think the golden age of TV was years ago, you are definitely missing an opportunity.”
TV advertising also gives brands an opportunity to indulge in a form of “costly signalling”, a behavioural science term derived from how people make themselves more attractive to prospective mates. Applied to consumerism, it means the very fact of having the wherewithal to advertise on TV conveys a message about the value, and success, of a brand, helping to build trust.
“That has been proven,” says Jasper, pointing to research from Thinkbox, the UK marketing body for commercial TV, and research specialist House51.
“When you see a brand on TV you automatically assume, even if subconsciously, that it’s a legitimate company, because we know that TV is expensive and if you can afford to be there, you must be good. That’s something you can do with TV that is harder to do on digital,” she adds.
“Their research proved a very clear relationship between the perceived cost of an advertising channel and brand metrics such as quality and trust. As a perception of advertising cost increases, so does a brand’s trust and quality scores if you’re advertising on those channels. And TV is far and away the most trusted among adults, both old and young.”
One aspect of TV which hasn’t quite lived up to expectations for advertisers, however, is connected TV (CTV). While inventory is being added all the time, and platforms such as Netflix – which initially eschewed advertising – change course, activity has grown, helping to bring down costs. Yet still, marketers are often surprised by the expense involved, says Jasper. “CTV is so much more expensive than linear television because of how it is bought and sold; there are just fees upon fees,” she says.
“If you work with a traditional DSP [demand-side platform] there are costs you have to pay through the entire supply chain. And while we were really excited that CTV was going to let us target like digital, TV sets are not like iPhones. After all, I watch the same TV as my husband and parents or friends. So you might be overpaying to reach a certain individual and actually be reaching another.”
On top of that is the challenge of managing the sheer variety of streaming platforms, from Disney+ to Netflix, Prime Video, Paramount+ and beyond. “And everything is served within these walled gardens, so there’s no true view of everything across every platform,” points out Winterlich, who contrasts it with Nielsen’s all-encompassing work on linear TV.
Such fragmentation is a huge challenge. “We struggle to navigate content so imagine how it is for advertisers, facing the same fragmented supply landscape. And now we have even more inventory, with Amazon introducing ads, and Netflix. It has led to more supply, which has helped push CPMs [cost per 1,000 clicks] down, but that doesn’t mean advertisers are getting more value,” says Jasper. If anything, it just reduces transparency. “It’s really hard to get a holistic view of things,” she adds.
It is in part why Marketing Architects favours taking a multilayered approach.
“We are seeing incredible business results from TV, and great results from streaming as viewership shifts,” she says. “The one amazing thing TV does is that it kind of forces good marketing. Telling a story in a video commercial is not easy to do. You have to clarify your positioning. It forces marketers to be sophisticated, and to go big, because you typically have to invest more in TV to see a result.”
Jasper believes every marketer worth their salt should be watching TV.
“It’s evolving and changing – but it definitely still has a bright future.”
