And it's been the most effective advertising media for every one of those years, says James Hurman.

When I got my first job as a planner in the ad industry it was 2003. What a year that was. We had Finding Nemo! Camera phones! Sars! The iTunes Store! The chaos factory that was Mojo was looking for planners, had barely any money to spend on them, and I was going cheap.

Me and Lisa Divett got hired to be baby planners. And pretty much the first thing we were told was that TV was dead. The 30-second spot was dead.Everyone had stopped watching TV and started making profiles on MySpace and spending all their time on the internet. There literally wouldn’t be anyone watching TV or making TV ads within the year, and so we’d need to master new ways of connecting with consumers.

I took to the challenge like what I was – a 20-something whose mum watched TV. Of course TV was dead!

Advertising on the internet, or anywhere that wasn’t TV, was what all of our clients needed to do.

I forged my career as an anti-tradition guy. Launching MacKenzie bread with the paper packaging as the core creative idea. Putting a road cone on top of the Sky Tower for V. Building a treehouse restaurant for Yellow Pages. Putting apple tree twigs in Monteith’s cider boxes. Making the ‘impulse saving’ product for Westpac. Doing it all to create chat on the internet. I loved advertising that was anything but a TV ad.

And I was right to do all that. Because after all, TV was dead.

Effectiveness is King. Long live the King‍

Along the way, I got weirdly interested in advertising effectiveness. I was a little perplexed that we didn’t really understand how advertising worked. Not in a proper evidence-based way. I started by doing data analysis on more and less creative campaigns and agencies to see if creativity really was, as the creative acolytes sermonised, commercially important.

I remember speaking to Peter Field on the phone in 2009 and comparing our data and realising that (a) creativity was, according to the data, undeniably effective, and (b) we both had a strange penchant for analysing data to interrogate correlations between advertising variables and commercial outcomes.

Mostly during weekends. I wrote The Case for Creativity and he and Les Binet wrote The Long and Short of It and he became world famous and I made just under $1,000 from royalties. And we remained kindred spirits.

Between the late 00s and now, the marketing and advertising effectiveness discipline has gone from barely existent to fully formed. Researchers the world over are now able to assemble and analyse comprehensive data to understand what works, what doesn’t – and what we can do to make it work better. Econometrics has helped enormously, as has the work of academic organisations such as the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. When I started in advertising, the industry had(bless) no evidence-based understanding of how its product worked. Today, we have a very high-resolution knowledge – and when brands follow the principles, they dominate. Look at the IPA Effectiveness Awards winners from last October –they’re basically all stories of brands applying the principles and driving silly growth.

Look at Turners – the sharemarket darling of New Zealand– who followed the advice and eviscerated both their competition and the idea of what a used-car business should be able to achieve in terms of enterprise value.

Within all of that, the most perplexing thing is the ongoing effectiveness of TV advertising. The 30-second spot might have bitten the dust, but the results it produced just kept on coming.

TV was dead in 2003. It was more dead in 2004, because of Facebook. It was even deader in 2005, thanks to YouTube. By 2007, when the iPhone launched, it was cold and dead. By 2014, when I left the ad industry, it was super-dead – the only people left watching TV were supposedly in palliative care.

Yet through all of those years, every time anyone did a proper analysis of media effectiveness, they found that TV was by far the most effective medium in terms of return on investment.

Study after study – from those olden days at the start of the century, right up to 2024 – has calculated the hard commercial returns from every different media, and concluded that old-fashioned television advertising does far more to build brands and drive sales and market share than anything else.

Search, display and social media advertising seem incredibly cheap and incredibly measurable, but ultimately deliver little more than small sales spikes to companies whose actual job is to create abiding value for shareholders by growing into very large, very profitable companies.

‍People still watch an average of 1-3 hours of TV per day‍

So why? Why in 2003, when TV was dead, was TV the most effective media? Why, in 2013, when TV was really dead, was TV the most effective media? Why, in2023, when TV was completely dead and buried, was TV the most effective media?

In marketing, we need to face the fact that we’re highly susceptible to fallacious market rhetoric around TV being dead. Yes, TV audiences have declined – but when you actually look at the average time spent watching TV in the US, the UK, New Zealand or anywhere else, you see that the decline (even among young audiences) has reduced to an average of people watching 1-3 hours of ordinary TV per day.

No, those people are not us. They’re not the 3% of the population who live in central city suburbs, shop at Farro and discuss podcasts at dinner parties. They don’t snobbishly reject TVNZ in favour of Netflix and Apple TV. They’re the other 97% of people who account for 97% of the economic activity in our market – and the growth of our sales.

They watch TV. They watch TV ads. And the TV ads work on them way better than the ads they see on the internet. One of the reasons is that they pay attention to them. Attention Queen Karen Nelson-Field has shown that people largely ignore online ads, watching maybe one, maybe two seconds of them. When, for an ad to actually stick in someone’s mind and influence a later purchase, it needs at least 2.5 seconds of attention. What’s the average attention for a TV ad? It’s pretty close to the full 30 seconds.

‘Reach’ is good, but nuanced. Reaching 1,000,000 people for one second is nowhere near as good as reaching 10,000 people for 20 seconds. But hardly anyone gets that.

They find it impossible to grasp the effectiveness of TV, when they can buy so much more dumb reach on digital platforms.

The reality is that it’s not just about the amount of people viewing. A smaller overall number of people paying attention to your ad for many seconds is much more likely to drive sales than a larger number of people more or less ignoring your ad.

‍TV: a critical part of the marketing mix

Alongside the Commercial Communications Council, I’ve been involved in creating the Aotearoa Effectiveness Database. We’re replicating the IPA’s Databank, which is the dataset behind studies like The Long and Short of It.

Doing so means we New Zealanders can study what works in our market when it comes to driving commercial outcomes with advertising.

We now have three years of data, and despite the fact that we’re a much smaller market than the UK, we find very similar outcomes.

One of those is that the most effective advertising in New Zealand almost always uses TV as either the lead media or an important part of the mix. Just as the IPA Effectiveness Awards gold and grand prix winners (in a market where TV viewership has declined, just like in New Zealand) almost always have TV as their lead media – even last year in 2024.

The data also shows that campaigns leading with broadcast channels like TV are three times better at creating future demand and driving long-term growth than campaigns leading with digital channels. It shows that 30” and 45” spots are five times more effective than the 6” and 15” on the internet. That ads viewed on large screens like TVs are 10 times more effective than those viewed on small screens like phones.

This year, you’ll be told that TV is dead. That the TV networks are losing viewers and in terminal decline. That this must mean that TV advertising is not worth doing. And you’ll probably believe it – just like I did in 2003 when I was told that TV was dead. But, in 2004, when they calculated the most effective media they found it was TV.

In 2024, we were all sure TV was dead. But, this year, when they calculate the most effective media, they’ll find it's TV.

TV is an evolving platform that continues to deliver, year after year

‍This year, you’ll almost definitely lose market share to competitors who use TV.

In 2026, you’ll see the research and find that, despite what you were told about TV being dead, it was actually still the most effective media in 2025.How do I know? Because it’s happened every single year of my whole career.

TV will remain extremely effective for many years to come.

Yes, it’s evolving – TV now encompasses linear, BVOD, SVOD and things like YouTube shown on a television screen. And yes, exploiting all of those formats is sensible.

But the fact remains – reaching broad audiences with large-screen advertising that they actually pay attention to is still the most effective thing
we can do.

You should probably keep that to yourself. I know one marketer whose wildly successful business won’t let him speak publicly about how much they spend on TV and how well it works, for fear of their competitors realising that TV’s not dead and beginning to use it. That’s where we’re at. The most successful brands use the dead TV myth to beat the competition.

Think that’s ironic? Then how about the irony ofmarketers killing their own golden goose?

Our choice as a marketing community is either to invest less and less in TV, precipitate its decline and eventual death, and say goodbye to by far the most effective brand and business building weapon we’ve ever had. Or invest more in it, enjoy the much better results, and be able to keep enjoying them forever.

It shouldn’t be a hard choice, marketers.