• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, September 12, 2012

To hear TVB President Steve Lanzano tell it, Henry Blodget isn’t any better at writing about the media than he was researching stocks for Wall Street. In his opening remarks kicking off the TVB’s Forward Conference Wednesday morning, Lanzano challenged a recent story by Blodget, the disgraced research analyst-turned blogger who declared that the TV industry was headed toward collapse.

Lanzano asserted that Blodget “didn’t let the facts get in the way of” his reporting. 

“Our value proposition has never been better,” declared Lanzano, citing various third-party sources to make his case.

Contrary to Blodget’s assertion that just about everybody time-shifts and nobody watches commercials any more, Lanzano referenced Nielsen data. It indicates that live viewing accounts for 87% of all TV watching, which continues to make it the dominant way audiences access the medium.

As to who does or doesn’t watch TV ads, Lanzano cited Nielsen data reporting that 50% of viewers watching programming in DVR playback mode watch the ads, as well. (To what extent they’re actually watching the ads versus just not skipping through them remains the subject of debate.)

While TV viewing via the Internet and computers is catching on, the TV screen still dominates in that regard, accounting for 95% of all viewing, Lanzano said.

Television is still the “primary action driver through the consumer purchase tunnel,” he said, citing Nielsen surveys that show 37% of respondents believe television is the most influential medium impacting their purchase decisions.

Clearly, the amount of time people spend watching TV on a daily basis -- more than five hours -- wouldn’t suggest a medium that is dying. By comparison, he noted that the average daily time spent with Facebook and Pinterest is about 13 minutes and 1.6 minutes, respectively.

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