27 Nov 2023 | The Media Leader Staff

Peter Field: ‘Any sensible marketer would be crazy to walk away from TV’

Podcast: Field, left, and Oakes

The Media Leader Podcast

Renowned advertising effectiveness expert Peter Field joins editor-in-chief Omar Oakes to discuss TV’s resilience, trust in media, and why attention research has rekindled his passion for media.

Field discusses why he will tell our upcoming Future of TV Advertising Global conference that “TV is still at the heart of effectiveness”.

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Field will use the latest effectiveness evidence from the UK and Australia to explain why TV remains such a powerful medium, despite the well-reported challenges that it faces.

He also admits to what big mistakes he’s made in his career, why he’s so excited about the recent wave of attention research in the industry, and why trust in media has become so important to consumers as to impact their advertising responses.

“The three certainties in marketing are death, taxes, and people taking potshots TV,” Field says. “It just starts to look a little bit like a relentless kind of attempt to take TV down. The fact of the matter is, and I will show this at the conference, is that TV plays, if anything, a strengthening role in effectiveness.”

“Any sensible marketer would be crazy to walk away from TV, even with younger viewers, even with those difficult 16 to 35 [demographics]. There is no sane case for walking away from TV.”

Attention findings have made Field ‘excited about media again’

Asked why he’s passionate about media, Field praises the work of Karen Nelson-Field (Amplified Intelligence) and Mike Follett (Lumen Research) for leading the industry movement to measure people’s attention on media rather than purely time spent or the viewability of content and ads in media.

Podcast: Attention measurement is ‘once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a killing’

Field says: “It is only through the work of Amplified Intelligence, Lumen and and the others in this world, that we’ve really now begun to understand the extent of the misleading and misunderstanding metrics that we’ve been using to make investments. So I think it’s a great and really important time, in the understanding of the way media works.

“It’s made me excited, again, in a way that I was beginning to lose before…. We’re going to get some, some lovely new discoveries and some reinvention of the way investments are made with online, particularly, as we now can put some much more sensible value to different investments. I think it’s going to have a hugely positive impact on the quality of those platforms. I think it already is.”