Just when you were ready to believe that television advertising was a thing of the past evidence to the contrary gets in the way.  Certainly, television spending leaves took a tremendous dive as a result of this lousy recession, but its effectiveness apparently hasn’t.

Advertising Age recently reported that a new seven figure ethnographic study conduced by the Neilsen Co.  found that “TV remains the dominant medium even for reaching youth, despite the inroads of digital and social media.”

The article goes on to say that Media Marketing Assessment (MMA) a unit of Aegis Group’s Synovate has not seen a trend toward the erosion of effectiveness of TV.  In fact a third of search queries for brands studied are driven by offline advertising, particularly TV.  Higher than what’s driven from online.

Leonard Lodish, a marketing professor at Wharton and author of “Why Advertising Works,” says that TV advertising’s effectiveness has actually increased since 1995.

So, in the face of the clamor from “new age media” gurus, what do you do?  Our suggestion is to not buy the hype, but listen.  We are big believers in the power of the web, but we’re also big believers in the power of traditional media when combined with the web.

No one goes searching for a product that they don’t know or care about.  I still haven’t received an answer to the question of “Can you name one consumable brand built entirely on the web?”  Traditional media, while changing, is not dead.  It’s a good thing too.  I’d hate to miss the next episode of the Simpsons.