Through the years, I’ve shared my professional background in television advertising sales. As a salesperson, I kept a close eye on the annual Emmy Awards. The more awards our shows won, the easier it was to sell commercials to advertisers – plus it was more fun to brag when you represented a network affiliate that won a big haul.

In 1999, when I was with an ABC-owned station, The Practice and NYPD Blue won a bunch of hardware. Edie Falco won the Best Actress in a Drama Series for her role in The Sopranos on HBO. That year, nine of the 10 primary awards were won by a major broadcast network.

When the Emmy Awards were handed out in 2014, five of the 10 primary awards were won by major broadcast networks. Breaking Bad had begun its incredible run and captured a handful of awards, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus was no longer on Seinfeld and took the award for her role in VEEP.

Recently, the Eagles were losing an NFL football game badly, so I tuned into the 2024 Emmy Awards. I was familiar with most of the shows being nominated, so it caught me off guard when only two of the top 10 winners were from a major broadcast network.

That’s a real trend, and there are reasons for it. For now, I’d like to share my observations about television’s biggest night.

Deliver Your Message2the Audience Where They Are
The reality is people are consuming more video than ever. They’re just not watching in the locations where past generations had their eyeballs and where advertisers and agencies traditionally placed their ads. Granted, broadcast TV still has the largest concentration of viewership, and when big events are happening, the nation tunes in to ABC, CBS, Fox, or NBC.

However, they are also watching cable networks, which during my sales career were the upstarts. Now the cable networks are being challenged by the streaming services – today’s up-and-comers. While audiences are consuming record amounts of programming, they’re watching on totally different devices. Our media director says, “I watch the internet on my TV, and television on my phone and computer.”

It’s a mixed-up media world, and making sense of it can be very difficult. There are rapidly developing options complicating your thought process as to where to invest those valuable advertising dollars. That’s why so many of our clients depend on our understanding, expertise, and direction as we guide them through the murky waters of “television” advertising.