Television, the king of "now"

TV – the shrine of modern times is not going anywhere, not for a long time. People preaching the end of television seem to be blind to the fact that the current transformation in content consumption is not about the distribution models, it´s about time. Of course some of us want to binge-watch our favorite show from Netflix whenever we want, but there is a lot of people still who gather around the modern camp fire at a certain time every week to share a story. And let´s face it, Superbowl is better live than watched as clips from YouTube the next day.

TV, in all it´s glory, is a linear content distribution channel and linear TV is best for events and developing stories. Everything that happens in the "now". Linear TV dominates our hunger for fresh content and looking at the figures, sports is the king of live content on the planet. The devotion of sports fans will keep linear TV relevant for a long time to come. TV is also the most effective way to reach millions, even billions of people simultaneously. You don´t see millions of people gathering to internet at the same time to witness an event (Ok, the Stratos jump and the wedding of William and Kate excluded, but those events also gathered ten times more audiences in TV). We, as content producers depend on television to make phenomenons out of our creations.

Looking at any transmedial storytelling campaing, TV is the best way to steer traffic to other touchpoints. And that goes for marketing automation as well. The results we have got from our campaigns for Fonecta, a finnish internet marketing tools provider for SME's, clearly show that without the support of television, the numbers drop through out the sales funnel. Even with a massive online campaign combined with quality content and effective automation. Although online is gathering viewers, TV is still the most powerful tool to tell compelling stories and drive traffic to other channels.