This Week in #TVNews: Gritty, Burger King Ads and Social Video Spend

Here’s the TV news we followed this week, from the introduction of the Philadelphia Flyers’ mascot to Burger King’s AI-inspired spots. 

• • Digital video and social video spend expected to rocket. eMarketer forecasted that U.S. digital video ad spending will exceed $50B in 2022, and social video ad revenue will reach nearly $12B in 2020, more than double what it was in 2017. What’s unsurprising is that Facebook will bring in the most social video dollars, followed by Twitter and Snapchat. Facebook, with its recently introduced mid-roll video format, says that more than 100 million hours of video are watched daily on its platform.
  • Fall brings cooler temps, PSLs and, of course, new TV. “The Good Place” continues to be one of the smartest-written and heartfelt shows on TV. Amazon premiered “King Lear” starring Anthony Hopkins and the other A-list Brit actors (hi Emma Thompson, Emily Watson and Jim Broadbent). If remakes are your thing, “Murphy Brown,” “Magnum PI,” “Last Man Standing,” and “Charmed” were all revived.
  • The Flyers’ new mascot gets mixed reactions. The Philadelphia Flyers have a new mascot, Gritty, a hairy orange creature that “looks like a Muppet who fell into a vat of radioactive materials and clawed his way out.” In his (its?) first week, Gritty appeared on “The Tonight Show,” inspired a beer called “Nightmare Fuel,” and gained nearly 100,000 Twitter followers.
  • “Flame grilled, just like you,” says a robot voiceover during one of Burger King’s new AI-inspired spots. Remarkably, AI isn’t behind the funny ads; credit goes to ad agency David Miami. As Burger King’s Marcelo Pascoa told Adweek, “Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for a great creative idea coming from a real person.”

See highlights from last week here, and check back next week for more.