Too Long for a Tweet, Too Short for a Blog Post XXVI

Here's an excerpt from a Financial Times article I just read, "How the Mad Men Lost the Plot":

What if you were to invent a way of getting light buyers to recall your brand just as they are about to choose? Ideally, it would reach millions of people who aren’t particularly thinking about your product. You’d want them to see the same thing at around the same time, so that they can talk to each other about what they’ve seen, reinforcing each other’s memories of it. You would need to sneak up on them, since they have near-zero interest in hearing from you, indeed don’t want to. You’d need a form of content requiring negligible mental effort to process: one which comes in bite-sized chunks, but which is still capable of moving and delighting. It turns out there is an app for that: the TV ad.

TV is in healthier condition than anyone predicted 10 years ago. The average viewer watches nearly as much TV, on TV sets, as he or she always did, and now they watch programmes on mobiles and tablets too. We aren’t skipping ads any more than we used to: 87 per cent of viewing in the UK is “live”. A recent US study found that ad-skipping is declining; people are too distracted by their phones to bother. The passive nature of TV turns out to be its hidden weapon: it facilitates a détente between viewer and advertiser. The best ads make us pay attention and look up from our phones.