LIKE A STAND-UP comic taking his show from town to town, Mark Ritson, adjunct professor of marketing at the Melbourne Business School, took to the stage at a MediaWorks presentation in February to deliver one of his favourite gags, a muted two seconds of Gone with The Wind across half the screen. The point being that in the digital world, videos are reduced to practically nothing, with views counted as watching for two seconds. How can that compete with TV, he asks? To him, it can’t.
In the past year, both Ritson and Bob Hoffman, AKA The Ad Contrarian, have visited New Zealand, thanks to MediaWorks and TVNZ, arguing that the reverence marketers and agencies have for digital is misplaced and that TV remains very much alive here and around…