2013: A year in TV by Thinkbox

2013 was another great year for commercial TV. Record TV advertising revenues reflect a golden age of TV content and an expanding medium helping advertisers find new ways to tap into its unrivalled effectiveness.

Advertising trade bodies will always find something positive to say about their medium when they look back at the year just gone. If there was a Fax Advertising Bureau it would no doubt find grounds to claim that 2013 was a vintage year. So, before you opened this glossy tome and started reading this foreword, you knew I was going to be positive about TV. But hopefully, after the next 600 words or so, you’ll find it very difficult to disagree with the fact that TV – and commercial TV in particular – had an awesome 2013. We love facts at Thinkbox – and we love bullet points – so I’ll start with some of those:

• Total TV ad revenue rose by 3.5% to a new record level of £4.63 billion. 2014 is forecast to be better again
• 737 advertisers tried TV for the first time or came back to it after having been away
• TV advertising has never been better value
• Total TV viewing remained at the 4 hour mark – although the good weather and a lack of major sporting events combined to knock a few minutes off the average viewer’s day
• Broadcaster VOD continues to grow, with the average viewer watching an estimated 6 1/2 minutes a day (approximately half of this is via the TV set
• We each watched 47 TV ads at normal speed every day

Beneath these solid surface figures is a fluid, vibrant and expanding world. As Kevin Spacey said at the Edinburgh TV Festival, we are enjoying a golden age for TV content. This is reinforcing the peerlessly effective environment that TV advertisers enjoy. And those advertisers are being increasingly creative in how they use TV – see our full report for some of the innovative ways in which brands are partnering with broadcasters to develop multiplatform, content-led campaigns.

Read the full report below and see more from Thinkbox in our Clubhouse.