TVB defends commentary questioning marketers' ad placement decisions

Local media broadcaster TVB has defended its recent comments which questioned marketers' ad placement decisions and asked them to make wiser choices when placing ads on media platforms.

This comes as the broadcaster posted a statement on LinkedIn, asking why marketers would place ads on media platforms with higher advertising cost per rating point (CPRP), and why they did not turn to media platforms with higher programme ratings such as TVB with higher return on investment (ROI).

The statement also used one of its drama "G-NiiB微生態配方特約：下流上車族" as an example, citing the number of views of the first live episode to be 22.5 points, with an increase to 23.2 points for the second episode. TVB said this is much higher than its competitor for the same period.

“TVB’s programme rating is not generated by the company itself, but rather it is calculated by CSM Media Research, a third-party professional research company appointed by a committee composed of three free TV stations and 4A advertisers. 23.2 points means that an episode has an average of 150 million viewers every minute, while another TV station has only a three- point viewership at the same period, that is, an average of about 19 million viewers per minute,” the post read.

The statement has drawn heated discussions across online platforms, with some commenting that TVB’s rating is not accurate as the method to conduct the rating might be outdated in current social media engagement, a check by MARKETING-INTERACTIVE found.

Some commented that TVB’s target audience is also a narrow one. “That means you can (luckily) entertain a certain age group people only. An ad usually targets a certain group of people in today's marketing strategy. The glory of TVC that could impact the mass media is long gone.”

Social monitoring firm CARMA saw a total of 40.9% negative mentions related to TVB’s LinkedIn post. “In particular, a large number of mentions were seen on LIHKG. Most netizens expressed concerns with TVB’s questionable approach, in which they chose to badmouth one of their competitors on LinkedIn,” said Charles Cheung, CARMA’s GM.

The original LinkedIn post generated over 650 engagements and 250 comments as of 1 November, with many LinkedIn users believed that the post was unprofessional and it appeared that TVB’s marketing team does not understand the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook, according to Cheung. “Some pointed out that CPRP is an outdated vanity metric. A few LinkedIn users suggested that the post is of low quality and that it looks like it was written by interns,” Cheung added.

Soon after the post was released, TVB put up a statement to clarify that the original post did not intend to attack any marketers. Rather, the post expressed that CPRP is an important scientific equation of measurement, hoping to attract market attention and highlight the importance of CPRP.

“TVB has been working with industry stakeholders and the advertising industry to participate in ratings surveys, using ratings as the most credible evaluation basis. Currently, the industry optimises the inclusion of digital platform data on the evaluation benchmark as an industry indicator for future generations,” the post read.

The statement said TVB believes that as the industry's unanimously recognised common currency, discussing and promoting CPRP is definitely beneficial to the development of TV and advertising industries, and is also in the best interests of advertisers. The incident did not intend to target anyone, let alone to attack anyone in the advertising industry.

Commenting on the incident, Anson Shum, vice president of marketing at SAUVEREIGN told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that CPRP is only one of the many benchmarks for marketers to evaluate our advertising plan. "It may be true in some cases that the lower the CPRP the better the plan is with being cost effective, but it could also come at the cost of compromising quality and effectiveness of the overall campaign," he added.  

"If the only one evaluation is being cost conscious then we probably don’t need the role of marketer given that even a computer can generate a media plan based on the facts and figures, which it is not effective at all. Other factors like reach of the campaign is also as important as CPRP to ensure given campaign is able to achieve the marketing objectives towards individuals who are within the defined target audience. After all, being cheaper is not always the best," Shum said. 

From a growth point of view, a seasoned marketer rarely deems CPRP as ROI, according to Samson Fong, head of marketing at Zenyum. "A higher rate point doesn't mean a higher trackable sale return. With so many ROI tools with scalability and trackability available for marketers e.g. paid social, CRM, SEM, SEO, pitching the ROI of a TVC to marketers nowadays is like bragging about the speed or gear shifter feature of a bike to Ferrari owners," Fong added. 

"From a branding standpoint, yes, a higher rating point (RP) could mean higher brand exposure. But since the digital and social media era, branding talks about granular segmentation, ad content customisation and targeted accuracy. A rating point gives you only the estimated audience size but never the audience profiles and persona, which marketers value most. Unless the editor tries to pitch the ad targeting accuracy toward an aged population - the inconvenient truth of the average age of TVB viewers behind the rating point, or else, the rating point alone doesn't tell marketers much about the audiences," Fong said. 

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