wrote that “Television will disappear in less than ten years”. In the same year, the chairman of the BBC, Sir Christopher Bland, said: “TV sets across the world will be jettisoned within a decade.” More recently, it is the New York University academic Scott Galloway whose thesis has become somehow more ideological. He sees the death of TV as that of “the advertising industrial complex”, the conspiracy of TV and advertisers which has been artificially sustained by big brands – in fact, the death of branding as we know it. This is also not a new angle. In 1994, Professor Ronald Rust and Richard Oliver prophesized exactly that in “The Death of Advertising”, published in the Journal of Advertising Research. What has actually happened since then? It is informative to look at the table of measured media investment between 1999 and 2017 prepared by my colleague Adam Smith of GroupM. It shows that linear television (or non-time-shifted broadcast of cable viewing) has maintained a strong position in a market much expanded by digital. Its share of around 40 per cent is the same as it was in 1999. TV is not dead! Graph showing that TV’s percentage share of media investment over the last 16 years has barely changed, and remains at around 40 per cent. The reason for this is that people’s viewership of linear TV still holds up, despite the surge in digital media. Of course, the real story here is that digital has gained at the expense of the press medium. There was a death of classified ads, and direct response has shifted en masse to digital. Even the press medium is not completely dead. It can be resilient in places where strong content is justified by journalism of quality and