Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 7:05 PM by Gene

If it's Sunday it must be BIG DOUBLE-A-SCRIBBLE TIME:

1. The Ranceoids remind themselves who reads their rag by shouting, "TV COMMERCIALS WORK BETTER THAN EVER!!!!!!!!!!"

BUT:

Despite the improved effectiveness since 1995, more than half the advertisers (16 of 29) in the study still lost money by running their TV ads. "The ones that did make a profit, though, did very well," said Mr. Lodish, to the extent that on the whole, advertisers in the study made a profit from their TV ads after 1995, but lost money before 1995.

That's obviously a serious caveat to the value of spending on TV. The other caveat is one that other marketing-mix analysts also report from client work that creative quality makes a big difference, in many cases explaining more about success and failure than media choices.

Mr. Lodish said he still doesn't really know how TV advertising effectiveness could have increased since 1995. Mr. Brooks can't really explain it either, though he has a theory that the highly analytical clients using marketing-mix modeling or matched-market tests may compensate for the impact of DVRs, fragmentation and clutter by making smarter bets.

TRANSLATION: We still don't know, no one knows, but the best part is we have a tenuous excuse for wasting our clients' and our CUSTOMERS' money annoying people into buying our goods.

2. And how well does annoying your customers work when most of them are switching to PRIVATE-LABEL?