It has been sad, especially for me who has advertised heavily on TV for more than one decade, to have watched the decline of live television. Apart from a few sports events, and even those show declining audiences, by and large people watch less and less live TV.  That means even if they want to watch a specific program they either watch it online or record it later when they zip through the adverts or without the adverts.  Advertising on TV has become less and less effective over the years and I, in particular, can see it in our call statistics and the new cases we take on from television advertising over the last three years.  The decline during that period in particular, which obviously also coincides with increasing internet speeds and it being cheaper and more cost-effective for people to have options such as Netflix, have really seen those calls dramatically reduced.

Business magazines talk about the generation of “cable cutters” and while they don’t literally mean actually cutting the cables, a lot of today’s younger generation, with the exception perhaps of Game of Thrones, simply don’t watch anything live on TV other than maybe a major cricket game, rugby match or soccer tournament when of course the advert break is the time to get up, stretch your legs, go to the bathroom or go and help yourself to a beer from the fridge.  What has been surprising though is how television companies have not really reduced the rates they charge for advertising during that time – perhaps the media buyers at the bigger firms – and I am talking about the major companies in South Africa – don’t seem to notice as much or they are too happy with all the special events they get invited to as a result of placing their firm’s media with those companies, but TV audiences, while not totally down, are certainly declining. 

In my industry of course most people would not advertise in the first place because the vast majority of attorneys simply unethically tout for business.  They pay touts up to R25,000 a case to bring them serious injury cases and that, from a cost-effective point of view, it is far cheaper than what it would cost to advertise for those same clients.  It is unethical, but I cannot think of when last an attorney was struck off for touting and even in the cases where we have laid complaints where attorneys have touted cases away from us precious little seems to have been done to them by the then Law Society and now the Legal Practice Council.