... chief research officer and president of CBS Vision David Poltrack kept hammering home that TV viewership is not in decline.
He also played down the assertion that millennials are moving away from TV content, while denying that advertising in TV programs has lost value.
Meeting with reporters at the Television Critics Association's summer press tour, Mr Poltrack insisted that "If executed effectively, advertising in TV programs has actually gained value".
Switching to attack mode, the CBS honcho said the audience for CBS programming has actually grown in the last decade.
It's up from 12.1 million viewers in 2003-2004 to 12.3 million viewers in 2014-2015. The big shift, he said, is that live viewing has shrunk from 100% a decade ago to just 61% now.
This downward trend, according to Poltrack, is because 79% of US households now have broadband, while 65% of US adults own smartphones and 42% own tablets, resulting in a shift in in the way audiences consume content.
Also coming out of his corner punching, Marc DeBevoise, evp and gm at CBS Interactive noted that "While smartphones and tablets have now been in existences for several years, the most recent major change in viewing habits is the rise of "connected TVs," now in 60% of US homes".
To cap his myth-busting panel, Poltrack also made the case that "people like advertising. They're not craving for a world without advertising." What audiences don't like, he said, are "ads that aren't relevant to them. But they enjoy ads that are relevant to them."
Read the original unabridged AdWeek.com article.