‘TV’s a crap medium? It’s the creative’s fault!’

The headline is my own paraphrase, but there’s an article in today’s SMH that has James Warburton, sales director of Seven, blaming the quality of TV commercials for the demise of TV’s effectiveness as an advertising medium:

"There’s all this discussion about position
in ad breaks and so forth but it’s the quality of the ad which is
always going to be what wins. Everyone forgets that fact. What if
we had some really good ads?"

Forget the fact that people can time-shift via Foxtel iQ, or Windows Media Center, or the soon-to-be-released-by-Seven-Media-TiVo; or get their TV shows from the Net (even legally, like networks here are beginning to test); or that there’s increasingly fewer free-to-air shows of any actual quality; or that there’s now other custom-made content on the net…  If people aren’t watching the free to air, or the free to air TV commercials, its because the ads aren’t "really good"…  Of course, that must be it.