What Makes Television So Powerful?

Marshall McLuhan stated that television has a greater effect on society than the specific content being delivered, by changing the way we consume information, make meaning, and engage with the world. McLuhan's analysis of television also extended to its impact on culture. He believed that the medium was shaping our perceptions, influencing public opinion, and even impacting political outcomes. He believed that television fostered empathy by bringing people together through shared experiences.

Neil Postman argued that television, due to its visual nature, is inherently biased towards entertainment. He believed that television transforms everything, including serious subjects like news, politics, and religion, into entertainment. This emphasis on entertainment, he contended, leads to a decline in the quality of public discourse and a decrease in the ability to engage with serious topics thoughtfully. Postman worried that television's turning everything into entertainment trivializes important issues by prioritizing sensationalism and superficiality over substance.

The infamous term “couch potato” blamed TV for making people more passive recipients as compared to the prior centuries of print media dominated culture. Science validated that TV induces a relaxed mental state (e.g. increased alpha brain waves).

So far, all these observations about television agree that the medium has enormous impact, some perceived as good, some perceived as bad – but to all observers, obviously powerful in a way nothing before it ever was.

As a child my observations about TV were colored by my show business background. Listening to my parents talk about performers and their performances in night clubs (my father the orchestra leader and MC could get me in although I was far younger than 21) and in Catskills resorts conditioned me to have a mental scale in which I could rate performers myself. I could see when a world class performer was in a Flow state and I could see when an act that was on a lower tier was bombing with the audience.

When I saw television, I noted that much of it was carried off on the highest level of professionalism. They had found some of the best talent and were producing excellent entertainment, some of it very educational for me, and curated wonderful motion pictures to replay on television.

In my adult life I’ve studied the effects of advertising in each of the media types and in combinations. The most recent studies were both sponsored by FOX. One was an econometric analysis of $48 billion in ad spend vs. $3 trillion in sales, which showed that streaming TV produced professionally has the highest Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), followed close behind by linear TV, with all forms of digital far behind. The most recent study, still ongoing, conducted with Wharton Neuroscience, shows far stronger effects of TV than digital on the brain, specifically YouTube shorts (pre-roll with Skip button and five second countdown) and Facebook video.

The Wharton neuroscientists wondered to what extent ad viewing duration was responsible for the far higher TV EEG (electroencephalogram) scores and just completed an analysis which controlled for viewing duration, by statistically making the viewing duration equal between TV and digital. The actual durations were quite different. In the lab, subjects watched the whole ad on TV in most cases, and the first 15 seconds in almost all cases, whereas they only chose to watch the same ads on average for less than a second on Facebook and 5 seconds on YouTube (skipping as soon as they could). This is consistent with findings from Amplified Intelligence and most of the other eye tracking companies. As you can see, controlling for duration made almost no difference when compared to the original slides in which duration was not held statistically constant.

TV Beats Digital

Content Matters!

This appears to be more testament to the power of television, that regardless of how long or short a time the eye is on the screen, television can have a strong positive effect on the brain. By comparison, the brief eye contact made with an ad in digital has some positive effect and some negative effect but in general it is of a lower order of impact, whether looking at brain attention, memory encoding, approach/avoidance, or synchrony. Synchrony is the most relevant metric for advertisers because synchrony is correlated 0.91 with incremental ad-produced sales effect according to years of work by Wharton with major advertisers the likes of Mars and others who prefer anonymity.

I have my own thoughts about why television affects us so strongly. It is the closest thing to life. Movies in theatres are larger than life, but television at all screen sizes is just like being there, a step away from virtual reality, which when perfected will be even more powerful than television. TV is immersive. Part of that is the degree of professionalism and the high production quality. We can suspend disbelief, put our own selves on pause, and become the character in the drama, so much so that we feel afraid when that character is threatened, we feel love in love scenes and scenes involving other types of love. Great writing, directing, acting, videography, video editing, music, spectacle. Great comedy and musical performances. The shared emotionality of live sports and live news.

RMT method captures 265 psychological dimensions of media and ad content, and the average TV series has more than three times as many of these Value Signals as the average YouTube short. This means that TV has far more ability to resonate with the viewer’s motivations than YouTube shorts. The more different ways that the brand makes positively valued connections with the viewer’s brain the better.

All media types have value for advertisers, but the swing of 80% of global ad spend to digital indicates a certain degree of underestimation of TV in my view, based on all the available data. All the top agency holding companies understand that linear is essential for a campaign to have high reach, but neither the buy side nor the sell side today is exhibiting understanding of the profound power of the television medium in terms of psychological impact.

The in-home continuous study of TV and digital using EEG and purchase data on the same homes, with the RMT method, which we are planning with Wharton Neuroscience and FOX, and have invited the industry to join (ARF and MRC have agreed to act as advisors) will provide the best possible framework for studying how an ad campaign moves the brain and the wallet from one impression to the next. This will help us learn how to best use all the media together for brand growth.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.