For years, television advertising has been a reliable and authentic way for brands to connect with their audiences and gain exposure for new products and services. While the format of television advertising has evolved over the years, its effectiveness remains the same.
Television advertising has been an inseparable part of marketing strategies for ages. Along with brand exposure, it offers many other advantages. However, it also has many downsides.
Let us explore the advantages and disadvantages of television advertising:-
Advantages Of TV Advertising
1. Has A Wider Reach:
Need to grab the attention of your target audience and make a
long-lasting impression? You can count on TV advertising to give you massive reach. It can also accomplish this in a minimum amount of time compared to other mediums.
2. Reaches The Audience At The Time They Are Most Attentive:
Advertising on television works for the brand as people are focused on what they are watching. They are paying attention to the screen and by displaying your brand, business, or service, they attract a
huge audience.
3. Offers High Credibility:
Television is a big platform for advertising your brand or business, helping you gain the trust of your target market. It showcases that you are serious about what you’re offering to the customers. Television advertising also provides your target audience with video evidence of the product quality you offer. With this type of advertising, you can choose a particular time slot to
broadcast your TV advertisement to attract maximum viewers.
4. Gives Your Brand/ Business A Visual Personality:
Television advertisement gives a visual personality to your brand or business. Several brands such as Dove, Cadbury Dairymilk, Pepsi, Lays, and others have created high recall value thanks to TV advertising.
5. TV Advertisements Are Simple To Analyze:
Generally, TV ads are
based on simple concepts and are easy to comprehend. With TV advertising, you can watch the brand message play out before your eyes and are faster to retain. TV advertising also offers a longer duration and can easily narrate a story and create instant memories about your brand or business.
Disadvantages Of Television Advertising
1. There Is No Guarantee Of The Audience Watching
It:
Television as a medium works on the presumption that your audience viewed whatever was advertised on screen. However, people are likely to carry on with their chores or put the TV on mute until their show resumes.
2. TV Advertising Is Costly:
A single TV spot can be quite expensive if you want your ad to air during prime time. Apart from booking a TV spot, you also need a budget to write an ad
script, hire people to act in your ad, edit the ad or hire an ad agency for the entire process. Also, to create a high recall value for your brand, you need to reserve multiple spots and run your ad repeatedly.
3. TV Advertisements Are Difficult To Change:
It is easy to make corrections to ads in other forms of advertising, such as print or broadcast. With TV advertising, your need to pay the cost of re-shooting and
re-editing the advertisement.
If you want to gain exposure for your business or brand through television, then visit Griffin Pictures, a TVC production house in Mumbai, that can help produce engaging television ads.
About the author: Taniya Jain is a content writer at Chimp&z Inc. Apart from writing, she likes to cook, explore different cuisines, read romance novels, listen to music, and dance.
Television advertising is an exciting medium to showcase your products and services. It reaches people in their homes, and engages sight, sound and emotions. Yet, it has disadvantages, too. Producing a commercial is a huge commitment of time, resources and funds. Carefully weighing the pros and cons is important in deciding if television advertising is right for your business.
Intrusive and Stimulating
Television is the whole package as an advertising medium. It's visual like print advertising, and auditory like radio at the same time. While a newspaper or magazine must be picked up and its pages turned for an ad to be seen, television reaches out to its audience whether they want it to or not. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 95 percent of people age 15 and over watch 2.8 hours of television every day. That adds up to a huge captive audience that allows advertisers into their homes on a regular basis.
Wide, Specific Reach
No other advertising medium reaches as wide an audience as television. While fewer people are reading newspapers and other periodicals, nearly every U.S. home has at least one television. With the aid of media representatives, it is also possible to target your ad to a specific audience by advertising on certain channels -- such as those watched by teens, preschoolers and their parents, or the golfing set. It's even possible to book time for individual shows and specific times of the day. Television ads can also be put onto television stations' websites to reach those who increasingly receive their news through the Internet.
Comparatively Higher Cost
The biggest disadvantage of television advertising is its cost. To a small business, the cost of advertising can seem prohibitive. It's expensive to produce a television commercial properly, including having a professionally written script, believable actors, experienced directors, and top production facilities. When advertisers try to cut corners in cost, the resulting ad's poorer quality is obvious, and can be more detrimental than helpful in the long run by causing potential customers to change channels and even avoid the company's products. In addition, ads need to air repeatedly to be noticed and remembered, and the more air time you buy, the more it costs.
Difficult to Produce and Change
Another major disadvantage to television advertising is how difficult it is to accommodate changes. Once a commercial is made, changing products or price points requires scheduling another shoot, hiring actors and directors again, and arranging for the production venue, a coordination process that can take weeks or months from scripting to final editing. Making such changes is costly, too. It is significantly more difficult to change television ads than print ads. Then, since television is such a high-profile medium, changes are much more obvious to viewers than in print media -- which can be positive or negative, depending upon how well the changes are received.
References
Writer Bio
Barbara Bean-Mellinger is an award-winning writer in the Washington, DC area. She writes nationally for newspapers, magazines and websites on topics including careers, education, women, marketing, advertising and more. She holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Pittsburgh.
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