MARK RITSON: CZECH MARKETING KNOWS WHAT TO DO AT CHRISTMAS. BUT IN JANUARY, IT FORGETS.

4. 2. 2026 Marketing expert Mark Ritson focused his commentary on Czech Christmas campaigns and how January campaigns are failing.

HOW CAN ADVERTISING RECAPTURE ITS APPEAL AND DRIVE BUSINESS RESULTS? BESIDES CREATIVITY, THE KEY FACTORS ARE EMOTION, DISTINCTIVENESS, AND CONSISTENCY

19. 12. 2025 New research by System1 and Effie Worldwide shows that advertising is losing effectiveness. However, the study also reveals how effectiveness can be increased again. While outstanding creative is one of the essential prerequisites, it is not enough on its own. Advertising needs to return to three simple yet often neglected principles: emotion, distinctiveness and consistency, according to a webinar entitled The Creative Dividend.

MARK RITSON AT THE VISION 2025 CONFERENCE: TELEVISION ADVERTISING OUTPERFORMS DIGITAL IN KEY AREAS – EMOTION AND ATTENTION

20. 10. 2025 In an inventive presentation, Mark Ritson channels Steve Jobs, presenting an alternative reality in which television and television advertising are only being invented today. This stylisation has a single aim: to show how dramatically we underestimate a medium that we have long had at our disposal, and to highlight the fundamental advantages that television advertising offers over everything we now label as “modern digital marketing”.

MAKING A MARKETER 2: MARKETING HAS A MARKETING PROBLEM

29. 10. 2024 The Marketing Festival team has released Making a Marketer 2, a documentary featuring luminaries from the current marketing scene.

RITSON’S 10-STEP GUIDE TO ‘STAND ON THE SHOULDERS’ OF ADVERTISING EFFECTIVENESS GIANTS

3. 10. 2024 We’ve entered a golden age for advertising effectiveness, but not enough marketers are taking advantage of all the work done by the giants of the field, says Mark Ritson, speaking at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing.

RITSON’S TOP 10 MARKETING MOMENTS OF 2023

29. 12. 2023 From Barbie’s brand extension and the Bud Light controversy to Tesla’s price drop and the rise of AI, Marketing Week’s trusted columnist reveals his biggest marketing moments of the year.

CONSUMERS DON’T GET TIRED OF ADS, ONLY MARKETERS DO

8. 12. 2023 Data shows there’s no such thing as advertising ‘wear-out’, so save your new campaign budget and spend it on making your current ads effective for longer.

BRAND-BUILDING ADS BOOST SHORT-TERM SALES, AND NOW YOU CAN PROVE IT

1. 2. 2023 Ten years since The Long and the Short of It was published, new evidence shows that while sales-driven ads deliver few long-term effects, brand advertising achieves both.

BRAND-BUILDING ADS BOOST SHORT-TERM SALES, AND NOW YOU CAN PROVE IT

1. 2. 2023 Ten years since The Long and the Short of It was published, new evidence shows that while sales-driven ads deliver few long-term effects, brand advertising achieves both.

THE ECONOMIC CRISIS AS A MARKETING OPPORTUNITY? 2023 DOESN’T HAVE TO CRIPPLE COMPANIES, BRAND LOYALTY AND A TOUCH OF EMPATHY ARE THE KEYS TO SUCCESS

5. 1. 2023 Analysts around the world predict a challenging year for business. According to them, the past year was essentially a warm-up and the cost of living crisis will only become fully apparent in the coming months. This will undoubtedly be a challenge for marketers in all sectors, but there are also words of comfort and encouragement that we can add - while the world faced an unprecedented situation during the pandemic, the cost of living crisis is not something we have no historical experience of. There was a similar situation in 2008, and it provided a lot of lesson that we can apply now. Marketing and advertising experts even claim that the crisis is an opportunity to make an established brand even stronger. The key to this is strategies that do not abandon marketing in favor of a short-term performance boost.

THE GLOBAL TV GROUP GUIDELINE: LESSONS FOR ADVERTISING IN A RECESSION

5. 1. 2023 Around the world there is no escaping the talk of a looming recession, and marketers everywhere are facing pressures to reduce advertising costs. However, research consistently shows – and experts continue to advise – that cutting ad spend comes at a high cost to brand health and long term business results.

MARK RITSON: HOW BRANDS CAN SURVIVE THE RECESSION AND EMERGE STRONGER

4. 1. 2023 One of the most comprehensive studies on recessions shows that only 9 percent of companies emerge from a recession in better shape than they entered it. What does this mean for marketers, and how should they behave during a recession to get their company out of it in the best shape possible? Mark Ritson, professor of marketing, and Jon Evans, Chief Customer Officer of System1, talked about this during the "Ritson on recession" webinar.

RITSON’S RECESSION PLAYBOOK: 9 STEPS MARKETERS SHOULD TAKE TO SURVIVE THE DARK TIMES AHEAD

21. 6. 2022 From retaining a long-term view and the importance of excess share of voice to making strategic changes to positioning and saying no to failure, Mark Ritson spells out how brands can navigate recession.

RITSON: DON’T STOP CAMPAIGNS IN RECESSION, YOU WILL INCREASE MARKET SHARE

23. 9. 2020 It is advisable to retain communication activity, especially in a recession, as it is important for a brand’s market share. This is a message conveyed to marketers by Mark Ritson.

REPORT: TV ADVERTISING STILL REIGNS SUPREME WHEN IT COMES TO INFLUENCING BUYERS

22. 7. 2020 It’s the industry debate that simply won’t go away – the effectiveness of TV advertising. The digital camp protests that telly’s best days are behind it, while others (arguably headed by Professor Mark Ritson) argue there’s plenty of life in the old dog yet.

IF YOU’RE IN MARKETING, NOW IS A TIME TO SPEND, NOT BEND

6. 4. 2020 There are very few upsides for anyone right now. A record number of companies, big and small, find themselves just weeks from insolvency. Employees are being let go in record numbers. And the media is collapsing as advertising dries up and a long, difficult and painful ­recession lumbers into view.

MARK RITSON: THE MEDIA BATTLE OF THE DECADE WILL BE FOUGHT FOR THE TV SCREEN

3. 10. 2018 Mark Ritson, the Australian university professor and marketing expert, started his European tour in Prague on Monday. He delivered a presentation to the representatives of clients, media agencies and the TV market. His speech ranks among the most interesting presentations on the local marketing scene in the last few years. Ritson came to Prague at the invitation of the Association of Commercial Television (AKTV), which continues its activities, inviting to Prague renowned representatives of the current marketing industry, predominantly those with a foreign university background. Initially, Mark Ritson provided a summary of the development of ad investments in media types in the recent 50 years using data from Morgan Stanley. He demonstrated that the last decade was significantly affected by the growth in digital media with the milestones being the years 2000 when Google started selling advertisements in its search engine and 2007 when advertisements were posted on Facebook. In Ritson’s opinion, the growth in the digital media had a negative impact namely on print media while radio and outdoor advertising was not affected too much by the onset of Google, Facebook and other digital platforms. That is because radio and OOH are more digital media today. Outdoor carriers are digitalised and more than half of radio broadcasting in the UK is delivered through digital platforms – DAB, applications and the Internet. (Editor’s note: This statement does not apply to the Czech radio where listening through FM still prevails.) As opposed to the above-mentioned media types, TV has not been impacted by the growth in the digital media and has succeeded in increasing ad investments despite the general perception that the days of TV are numbered. “In the media history, there has never been so much nonsense that would be so far from the truth. TV is not dying but the myth is spreading all over the world,” noted Ritson. The fact that big tech companies use TV advertising for communication and increase their investments in TV should be taken as evidence of the TV medium’s effectiveness. Ritson considers TV investments to be a goal pursued by digital players (represented namely by the Google/Facebook duopoly that accounts for 85% of all digital investments as estimated by Group M). “There is just one place that digital may use to grow – TV. It is a battle between digital and TV,” described Ritson. Technology firms will strive to attack TV ad budgets but the ‘battle of the decade’ will be fought for the TV screen according to Ritson. Or more precisely, for the ‘connected TV screen’, which he sees as the key medium. “I am not saying that TV companies are going to win but this is the playfield where the game will be played and that will be fought for. Digital firms will undoubtedly seek to get there,” he forecasts. But he is not talking about the form of TV broadcasting of ten years ago. In order to succeed in the competition, the existing TV companies must change – and go digital. With respect to the size of the Czech market, Ritson mentioned in the subsequent discussion that most probably, it will only be possible to face the global internet giants through cooperation with international TV players or associations. "The last decade was affected by the digital duopoly, completely devastating newspapers and taking most of their money. The next decade will offer a different battle. Digital firms will go after TV." says Mark Ritson. According to Ritson, the existing marketing mindset overestimates the effect of digital media. Although growing in recent years, mobile video is not the critical medium of future in his opinion. “Mobile video is small, we watch it occasionally when we have no access to a large screen,” he described. As indicated by the data of extensive research projects of BARB, ComScore or IPA Touchpoints, more than two thirds (71%) of all videos watched continue to be viewed on TV screens (live TV) and even millennials watch nearly half of video content on TV screens (47%). TV’s impact on advertising video content is expected to be even more significant with the majority of ad spots (90%) being watched on a TV screen. The times we are living in, which are referred to as the post-factual era, are to blame for the facts about media channel effectiveness being overlooked. Some of the guilt is also attributable to how media consumption development is perceived by marketers or agencies that tend to project their own media consumption methods to all consumers. The result is that while the data of Ebiquity’s Re-evaluating Media study demonstrate that traditional channels (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines) have the strongest effect on brand-building (in attributes such as reach, targeting, ROI, etc.), the marketer and agency community overestimates the effect of social media and online video. “It is a conflict between perception and reality,” noted Ritson. In order to achieve the highest communication effect, Mark Ritson recommends to integrate multiple media channels. TV is a medium that can still derive the largest reach from individual media carriers (in the Czech population, TV is watched weekly and monthly by 90% and 96% of people, respectively). Digital media also play an important role; however, Ritson thinks that their importance is exaggerated and investments in them are excessive. In conclusion, he also mentioned Les Binet’s opinion. In the last AKTV meeting in Prague, Binet spoke about the primary effect of reach on brand growth, about the importance of share of voice and the need to work on a long-term brand building. (You can read a summary of Binet’s presentation here). Mark Ritson recommended The Long and the Short of It written by Les Binet and Peter Field as one of the key marketing publications that would have an impact on communication planning in the near future. Source: mediaguru.cz

MARKETING SUPERSTAR MARK RITSON WILL START HIS EUROPEAN TOUR IN PRAGUE

4. 9. 2018 The Association of Commercial Televisions has been continuing their education activities by organizing third conference aimed at marketing professionals in the fall. For the first time they will join forces with the Slovakia’s Association of Independent Radio and TV Stations (ANRTS) to give Czech and Slovak marketers the opportunity to hear one of the most outstanding contemporary marketing experts, Australian professor Mark Ritson, live. In addition to him, the conference “Boost Your Media Performance“ will host the head of research at Thinkbox, GB, Nicole Greenfield-Smith, marketer Chris Goldson from the British commercial leader ITV, and other representatives of Czech and Slovak advertisers, who will speak about up-to-date topics within the client panel. Petr Šimůnek will be the host of the conference.