DRTV – too crass for your brand, or a sleeping giant yet to be proven in your marketing mix?

There is no doubt that much of the Direct Response TV (DRTV) content released and put on our screens in the infomercial heyday of the noughties was not the most sophisticated of advertising. But Direct Response TV doesn’t have to be a tirade of bigger and louder is better.

DRTV comes in all sorts of formats, from 30 second snapshots of a product or offer right up to 30 minutes of information about your brand, product or service. And not only that, DRTV can (and should) be cut for all sorts of media. Gone are the days where just one creative is made for linear TV. DRTV advertising is an asset that can be used to build brand voice across online and offline marketing.

Testing is key, so SmartResponse often recommend to our clients that they test a variety of lengths of creative, and sometimes different creative stories with the same brand themes running throughout.

The lovely thing about DRTV is that you can see and measure response to different creatives immediately and the creative begins to pay for itself immediately too; in the form of incremental awareness, interest, traffic and sales.

So, instead of cutting TV advertising budgets in difficult times because of concerns about waiting for the payback, maybe DRTV is worth a try.