If you have been reading the industry news in the United States, you will see that TV is back in favor. Spend is up, upfront CPMs are higher and - shock, horror - research finds that TV still drives word of mouth. Meanwhile there have been several articles that suggest that marketers are still scratching their heads when it comes to social media. Hopefully the increase in TV spend does not signal a return to the familiar over the new, because TV and social media are complementary to each other, not replacements.

In the lead article in Monday’s AdAge, titled, “Marketers Blame the Consumer in New Save-the-Planet Pitches,” Jack Neff summarizes the new message from marketers to consumers vis-à-vis responsibility for sustainable consumption: “It’s not us. It’s you.”

Neff offers recent U.S. marketing campaigns as evidence that marketers have shifted their focus from their own sustainability efforts to encouraging more responsible behavior from consumers. I would agree that as consumers, we are ultimately responsible for our behavior and its impact on the environment and global warming. But does that absolve companies from their responsibilities?

Anyone who has followed this blog for a while will know that I delight in being a contrarian. If an opinion, practice, or policy is widely accepted, I instinctively mistrust it. So when Jonah Berger, assistant professor of marketing at Wharton, stood up at the ARF Convention and announced that we should “ignore influentials,” he had my immediate attention. But if we ignore influentials, those trusted expert advisors who are often early adopters, then whom should we marketers attend to?

In a post I published back in February, I highlighted the role played by reach in ensuring the success of viral marketing—specifically viral video viewing. In preparation for my presentation at the ARF Convention in New York City this week, I revisited the data and was once again struck by how well supposedly “old” rules apply to new media. Rule number one: Creativity is king. Rule number two: Reach counts.

In research done by Millward Brown last year (described in this post), we identified four factors, all related to creative content, that were correlated with the number of weekly views an ad achieved on YouTube.

In recent years, clients have become ever more insistent in their demand that researchers deliver results in a way that engages the audience. Researchers can respond to this demand in a number of ways, including the use of storytelling, workshops, and data representations that are visually compelling. Anything that  helps engage people with research findings - what they mean, and what marketers should do as a result - is a good thing, but a recent experience of my own made me wonder if the need to tell stories is at odds with the need to present statistics. By writing this post I hope to explore the issue further.