AO stops all TV advertising to focus on digital

The online retailer will abandon TV as a medium within months, founder and chief executive John Roberts said at Retail Week Live today. Rogers confirmed that the company plans to cancel all TV advertising for the year ahead and hire more than 100 new tech experts.When asked by Facebook President EMEA Nicola Mendelsohn CBE about the company’s marketing strategy, he said: “We’ve made the decision for the year ahead to cancel all TV advertising. As we do more and more analysis of it, we can see the return on investment is higher when telling stories.“If your business doesn’t provide an amazing service, then social media isn’t for you – but we empower our teams to use social media and some of the programmes we’ve done have been phenomenally successful. It’s not about selling stuff, it’s about engaging in interesting conversations – give something fun and useful first and then, as an output of that, you get a transaction. TV advertising shouts at people. It won’t work. Social media is a completely different discipline.