The direct response TV (DRTV) advertising industry has always prided itself on its ability to convey the absolute return on investment for all media costs.
This hardest of all marketing metrics has made DRTV in many ways the ultimate arbiter of success or failure for all TV broadcast marketing. In the DRTV industry you cannot hide behind the softer target of simply ‘brand building’ as it’s ultimately about sales and generating profit.
Consumer behaviour, and not so recent developments in online technology, has now made the job of tracking sales of either physical products or services from DRTV advertising much more challenging.
Roll back a mere fifteen years and 90% of all sales from any DRTV advertising campaign for either short or long form infomercials were generated by 0800 telephone numbers featured on screen. The more adventurous consumers would occasionally in the early 2000’s venture onto ‘the internet’ to make purchases driven by DRTV, but there was still a general reluctance to trust the concept of parting with credit card details to make purchases via transactional websites. But this has all, of course, changed within a generation….
Welcome then to 2015 where many DRTV advertisers, especially in the services sector, have simply dispensed with using telephone numbers for DRTV as response mechanisms at all in their TV marketing. With a universal trust in online purchasing coupled with vast improvements in ‘search’ based web marketing the amount of consumers responding via the phone to DRTV advertising is circa 25% of the total.
So the challenge has therefore moved to tracking DRTV sales and the inherent need for sophisticated attribution via online analytics to determine the efficacy of any given campaign.
The good news is that DRTV is certainly still a viable proposition with the right creative and media for any client, but any advertiser needs to be aware that analytics are key to now to enable a successful DRTV campaign to be measured and optimised.
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