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Internet and digital
However, with the emergence of over-the-top media services, the Internet itself has become a platform for television, and hence TV advertising.
TV attribution is a marketing concept whereby the impact television ads have on consumers is measured.
Addressable television is where targeted advertising is used on digital platforms, so two people watching the same show receive different ads.
Digital television recorders and advertisement skipping
Though advertisements for cigarettes are banned in many countries, such advertising could still be seen in the sponsorship of events such as auto racing.
After the video cassette recorder (VCR) became popular in the 1980s, the television industry began studying the impact of users fast-forwarding through commercials. Advertising agencies fought the trend by making them more entertaining.
The introduction of digital video recorders (also known as digital television recorders or DTRs), such as TiVo, and services like Sky+, Dish Network and Astro MAX, which allow the recording of television programs into a hard drive, also enabled viewers to fast-forward or automatically skip through advertisements of recorded programs.
At the end of 2008, 22 per cent of UK households had a DTR. The majority of these households had Sky+ and data from these homes (collected via the SkyView panel of more than 33,000) shows that, once a household gets a DTR, they watch 17 per cent more television. 82 per cent of their viewing is to normal, linear, broadcast TV without fast-forwarding the ads. In the 18 per cent of TV viewing that is time-shifted (i.e. not watched as live broadcast), viewers still watch 30 per cent of the ads at normal speed. Overall, the extra viewing encouraged by owning a DTR results in viewers watching 2 per cent more ads at normal speed than they did before the DTR was installed.
The SkyView evidence is reinforced by studies on actual DTR behaviour by the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB) and the London Business School.