The death of the TVC?

We love filming high-end TVCs as much as every filmmaker does. It’s glorious to be able to focus your energy on a single 15-30 second spot, ensuring every frame is buttery perfection, telling a high-impact story designed to “wow” an audience. But truth be told, the TVC is dying… if not already dead.

Ouch. Yeah. Calling it as it is.

These days, it’s far more likely that your advertising spend now needs to cover a continual rollout of regular content across multiple social media platforms – 5 second edits for YouTube pre-roll, square edits for Instagram, and ultra widescreen edits for a banner ad, etc. You get the idea. A single 30 second TVC alone doesn’t cut it any more.

Looking at the bigger picture, broadcast television as a whole is struggling to stay afloat. Younger, tech-savvier generations are increasingly turning to the world of SVOD platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Amazon, Stan) and much prefer entertainment on demand, as opposed to traditional broadcast. The broadcast TV audience is shrinking rapidly, and so a TV commercial production, as a format, no longer has the impact or reach it was renowned for in the past.

Our brand film for Auswalk never went to air. But that doesn’t mean high production value wasn’t important for us.

For us, in the world of film production, we work on the principle that if you can find a way to inform people, whilst also entertaining, it’s an interesting time of transition, because a lot of older production companies and freelancers make a cost distinction between whether something is corporate (Internal), digital/social (Online), or commercial (TV). Once upon a time, there was a clear delineation between the kind of production value a client would expect for a TVC vs. a social campaign – but now it’s all becoming one and the same. Your audiences online still expect the same level of production quality that used to be associated with broadcast TV.

Article published October 11, 2019

(Updated March 24, 2023)