Groupthink results in faulty decision making. Commercial Communications Council CEO Simon Lendrum says many fall into that trap when it comes to TV.

Groupthink is the tendency to build strong collective beliefs that suppress critical inquiry and result in faulty decision making. 

Television – in all its delivery formats – has fallen victim to a particularly challenging form of groupthink, where it’s become normal to hold the position that no one watches it. That’s wrong. The data shows television, against any other media channel, still offers plenty of opportunity for brands to efficiently reach audiences. We seem to hold it accountable to its own previous results, and have made it a victim of its own success. 

The fallacy that fuels this groupthink is to think in purely binary terms. 

Either you use television or you embrace digital. Either you’re stuck in the past or you’re future-facing. In short, you’re either with it, or you’re a dinosaur. The most challenging aspect of binary belief systems is that they grow deep roots, resistant to contrary evidence. 

But when we interrogated the Aotearoa Effectiveness Database in late 2024, clear evidence emerged showing television still maintains its role as an essential component in the marketer’s toolkit. 

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The Aotearoa Effectiveness Database and “Future Demand in Action”

The Comms Council established the Aotearoa Effectiveness Database in 2022 to build a comparable dataset for Aotearoa, sitting alongside existing effectiveness databases running in the UK and Australia. We wanted to see how similar or different the conditions for effectiveness are here versus other, larger markets. 

Our first deep analysis of the database, Future Demand in Action, conducted by James Hurman, suggests that the principles previously discovered in the IPA’s The Long and the Short of It, and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s How Brands Grow, also hold true in Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Before we draw any television-centric conclusions, it’s important to establish some macro findings from Hurman’s report, that firmly move us away from groupthink’s binary conclusions:

• Whether converting current demand or creating future demand, campaigns are more effective the more media channels they communicate across
• Targeting broadly tends to be more effective for both demand tasks, whether that is done on digital channels or on broadcast channels
• It’s still true that both short-term results and longer-term brand building are required for the marketer’s job to be fully done. It is not a case of one or the other

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For Effectiveness, TV is Alive and Kicking 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that TV holds any sacred position versus other channels. But it should certainly be in the mix, whether for creating future demand or converting current demand. 

When it comes to effective advertising (as if any other kind matters), television is alive and kicking, data from the Aotearoa Effectiveness Database shows. An analysis of the database compared campaigns that create ‘very large effects’. Future Demand in Action identified, ‘The average number of very large effects’ on comparable characteristics. 

At the broadest level, for campaigns seeking to build brand and business long-term, campaigns that used TV performed slightly better than those that don’t.

Marketing is Still a Data-Led Business

What the data tells us is that to deliver the most effective campaigns, marketers should still hold television close, regardless of any intuitions or received wisdoms to the contrary. 

For absolute clarity, the database is consistent in signalling that this is not a call for television to be considered in isolation. Multi-channel campaigns – omnichannel for those who can afford it – always trump reductionist schedules. 

But it’s hard to reconcile the findings from the database with the broadcasters’ sales data. Revenue decline has exceeded audience decline, which an objective observer might conclude is where groupthink has taken hold. Personal or anecdotal reports of television’s demise have had a greater impact than the data. 

Given the evidence from the Aotearoa Effectiveness Database indicates that advertising effectiveness principles work the same way in Aotearoa as they do in other, bigger markets, fully embracing those principles suggests a new form of collective belief might better serve business outcomes in New Zealand.

The growing gap between television audience decline and revenue decline could also be seen as an opportunity gap. The opportunity is to reevaluate our prevailing groupthink, and reconsider television’s place in the marketing mix for delivering increased effectiveness in campaigns both long and short.