Yesterday I headed to Virgin Hotels in Edinburgh for the Thinkbox Televisionaries event, an afternoon of sharp thinking, honest conversation and some genuinely compelling research from the team at Thinkbox.
Joined by senior commercial leaders from Channel 4, ITV, Sky Media, STV and Amazon, the session covered the big questions facing advertisers right now and made a pretty convincing case for why television remains one of the smartest media decisions you can make.
Here are the key takeaways:
One of the most striking moments of the afternoon came early, when the Thinkbox team tackled the fragmentation myth head on. Yes, audiences have more choice than ever. Yes, attention is spread across more platforms. But the data tells a more reassuring story than the industry narrative often suggests.
Around 70% of the average person’s daily video consumption in the UK is still spent watching ‘Total TV’.
That is roughly five hours of video content a day, with seven in ten of those minutes on television. The comparison with YouTube on a TV set was particularly interesting; while YouTube reaches approximately 26 to 27 million people on a TV screen in a given month, Total TV achieves the same scale in a single day.
Fragmentation is real but the scale and daily reach of television remains largely unmatched.
In a world that feels increasingly uncertain and divided, trust matters more than ever to both advertisers and viewers. This was a recurring theme throughout the afternoon.
Thinkbox shared data from their trust tracker showing that television advertising is trusted roughly twice as much as YouTube and nearly three times more than social media.
What was particularly interesting was the generational dimension; even younger audiences, who may spend more time on social platforms, still trust TV advertising substantially more than anything they encounter elsewhere. They are spending time in social spaces but not always trusting the brands they see there. For advertisers, that is a meaningful gap.
The point was made clearly that viewers do not consciously think about why they trust TV. They trust it because they trust the content. That halo effect, from trusted programming to trusted advertising, is something no other channel replicates at scale.
Perhaps the most memorable section of the afternoon was the discussion around culture and what it actually means for brands. There is a lot of industry talk about being culturally relevant and Thinkbox offered a useful framework; genuine cultural impact requires shared reference points, repeated exposure and collective memory.
The contrast between TV and social virality was made vivid with a brilliant example. A TikTok trend around the Japanese cheesecake hack racked up around 750 million video views globally. Impressive, until you put it next to the Google search trend for Rivals, the Disney Plus drama. The cultural footprint of Rivals was 900 times larger. The difference in scale, the team suggested, is roughly equivalent to comparing Murrayfield stadium to a phone box.
The key distinction is predictability. TV’s cultural impact is not just big, it is plannable. Shows like Britain’s Got Talent spike every single week, reliably and at scale. Brands can see it coming, attach themselves to it and ride the wave for far longer than any viral moment allows. Social media is optimised for novelty; television is optimised for culture.
Thinkbox ran through a year’s worth of research at pace and it was genuinely useful. Three studies stood out.
‘Why Brands Matter’ explored what happens when you take trusted brands away from people who love them and give them back unbranded. Even when the product was identical, the absence of the brand name completely changed how people experienced it. Brands provide stability, identity and connection in ways that feel almost subconscious. Television advertising, sitting at the centre of family life, is uniquely placed to build those deep, lasting brand impressions.
‘Trust Transformed’ confirmed that where you advertise matters enormously, because trust in the media environment transfers directly to trust in the brand. The IPA has identified trust as the second biggest driver of business effects. TV’s trust advantage is therefore not just a soft metric; it has a direct line to commercial outcomes.
‘Staying Power’ looked at how advertising effects decay over time. After eight weeks, social media advertising had lost 26% of its initial effect, while TV had lost just 14%. But the most compelling finding was the multiplier effect; when TV is part of the media mix, the effects of every other channel decay more slowly too. Remove TV and social media’s effectiveness decays 17% faster; out of home nearly 30% faster. Television, in short, is the battery that charges everything else.
The message from the afternoon was clear and well evidenced. In a fragmented, fast-moving, low-trust world, Total TV is the one channel that consistently delivers reach, trust and return. It is not just good in isolation; it improves the performance of every other media decision you make alongside it.
For those of us planning campaigns for clients, the data from Thinkbox continues to make a compelling case. The best TV planning is not about nostalgia for a simpler media world. It is about understanding where attention, trust and cultural relevance genuinely live and investing accordingly.
A brilliant afternoon in Edinburgh, and exactly the kind of event that reminds you why the Scottish media scene is such a great one to be part of.
