If you take digital-native brands like Airbnb, Uber and Wayfair, it is a given that each of them has pretty significant digital marketing budget.

But, when each needs a further lift, they turn to television.

That is according to an analysis of a group of 80 “digital disruptors” by the Video Advertising Bureau, an industry body for TV and video companies.

“They all started with digital plans, and they essentially exhausted those plans and they got as far as they were possibly gonna get in terms of how big they were going to get,” says Video Advertising Bureau‘s Sean Cunningham in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“They all made the same big bet, they all bet on television. And not a toe in the water, but a big bet, meaning the future of the company was bet on /Is television going to work or not?’ In terms of pushing at scale, exponentially more productive leads into their site.”

In March, eMarketer forecast 2018 US TV ad spend would fall for the second straight year, as conventional TV audiences shrink and advertisers drive harder at digital, accountable channels.

Of course, Cunningham backs TV and new-line video providers. His VAB was formed in 2015 out of the old Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau (CAB0) and represents national broadcast and ad-supported cable networks, regional cable networks, MVPDs, major cinema advertisers and suppliers to the video advertising business.

He says, for companies like Wayfair, TV and video represents the majority of their ad spending.

He says VAB’s analysis of the 80 companies, whose TV ad spend totals $2.6 billion, shows “the corollary between their upward investment in TV and how it ties directly to their sales increase”.

“Video has been the most powerful thing for them, specifically television and video,” Cunningham says. “You know, they went from a company that had a few hundred million in sales to being a five billion dollar company in less than six years and they’ve used TV as the primary instrument to do that.”

He has no truck with the doom and gloom.

“We’ve seen is a rush of new advertisers,” he says. “And frankly a lot of those new advertisers who are pouring more and more money into TV are frankly hoping that a lot of their competitors are being distracted by headlines, whether it has to do with rating physics or OTT, or all the revolutionary changes that they’re having.”
