Who Watches TV Anymore?

I was reading this article at the Online Video Insider this week and found myself almost completely at odds with the ideas being expressed. I wasn’t looking for trouble, I just couldn’t agree with author Michael Kokernak’s idea that the future of advertising for video will be some kind of cross-platform convergence between your TV set and your Internet connection.

I realize that I don’t represent the mainstream. I got rid of my cable subscription and television years ago, but I still think that in 2009 and beyond when people think about TV and the Internet converging, they think about it happening on their computer, not on their TV. I just had a really good think about it and I can’t remember the last time I watched an ad on TV. It doesn’t matter to me how clickable and interactive you make TV ads, I’m just not there to watch them. 

Consumers are moving online and the advertisers that want to chase after them are doing the same. TV as an advertising medium is almost entirely obsolete apart from one or two cultural touchstones like the Super Bowl or American Idol.

But even if the audience wasn’t in the process of a mass migration, the advertisers would be. The web offers advertisers a level of accountability that has never been available to them before. Every dollar spent on advertising can be minutely tracked to measure its effectiveness. Even more excitingly, the internet is a medium with a glut of publishers. That means a surfeit of unfilled inventory available at competitive prices. It has never been a better time to be an advertiser and that has nothing to do with TV and everything to do with the ability of the internet to serve relevant ads with built in ROI.

Kokernak claims that the link between “the television platform and the Internet is the marriage of the century”. I think he needs to be more specific about which century he means.