This is a fantastic chart. Absolutely fantastic. This should be made into a poster and stuck on the wall of every ad persons office. You should write something about this for the APG website.

Great chart! That said, with the state of terrestrial tv right now, id imagine a larger percentage saying the adverts were actually better!

Did the adverts get worse, or did the programs get better?

Which makes me wonder if the old ads are so much better than the programmes why clients don't make more use of old advertising and establish whether the creative work they've already paid a fortune to develop has really worn out. Ad agencies have an interest in producing anything they can as frequently as possible in the interests of making money. But the client has no reason to pay up to originate new advertising if existing material already does the job and is already known and liked by the audience. I wouldn't expect ad agencies to go along with this at all - but media independents might be the honest brokers to bring this to the table.

Of course this technically works with the COI where the commission system still applies and you get a cut of the media spend if and when your ad runs. In this scenario agencies have every interest in established copy being repeated.

I think there'd be a good case to make that this is simply the UK getting back to the same place that the rest of the world has ALWAYS been at, after a weird short blip called "the 80s".