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The recently published Media Nations 2019 Report from OFCOM clearly illustrates the changing power structures within the UK broadcast industry and offers many insights into what the future holds and the challenges ahead for the TV advertising industry ‘as we knew it’. Recent seismic changes in broadcast consumption are driven by concurrent factors including new technology, new content generation, platform competition and generational consumption. These competing trends are set to continue dynamically in the years to come to radically change the way we, and future generations, consume television and video content. TV broadcast viewing still remains incredibly high with an average 3 hour and 12 minutes viewed daily by all consumers. This figure rises incrementally with age, with the ‘over 75’ watching on average five hours and 49 minutes per day on their televisions. There is an increasing gulf of viewing consumption behaviour for younger audiences as they have migrated towards video consumption via online services; with the much sought after 16-24 year old demographic watching on average 85 minutes per day on broadcast television, but an average of 73 minutes per day on YouTube. In recent years we have seen the explosion of Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD), driven primarily by Amazon Prime, Netflix, NOW TV and Disney Life. SVoD has reached 19.1 million subscriptions – a huge 24% increase in the last year alone – and now heavily eclipses the Pay TV Subscription services of Sky, Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk that now total a combined 14.3 million households. The battle lines for the future share of broadcast audiences is clearly now heavily based on the level of new content that can be produced by traditional broadcasters and new platform owners alike. As if the UK broadcast competitive landscape had not become hard enough in the fight for viewers, the introduction in Quarter Four 2019 of Apple TV+ and the new paid subscription joint venture between ITV and BBC, BritBox, and Disney+ will all be fighting for share. Four in ten viewers now report that online video services are now their preferred and main way of watching both television and video content. The advances in high-speed broadband – with over 80% of UK households having a connection – and the widespread distribution of Smart TVs, coupled with low cost SVoD packages, have led to a far wider choice of both media outlets and content. The continued fragmentation of audiences and viewership has put increasing pressure on all Media Owners and their advertising revenues looking ahead which have already seen reported decline during 2019 from Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs). It has been reported this week that the PSBs – ITV and Channel Four – are now lobbying OFCOM to extend the minutes per hour for advertising to presumably make up for this increasing shortfall in anticipated revenue looking ahead. It would appear that ultimately the quality and quantity of new content will be the primary driver in terms of ultimate success, whether the broadcaster relies on the newer subscription-based advertising light business model, or the traditional advert funded content model. Whilst this fierce commercial battle is fought amongst these relatively new and also established broadcast media monoliths, the Media Nations 2019 Report portrays television in the UK as a medium that in terms of both delivery options and variety of content remains great value for money and the ‘media of choice’ for the end consumer. Thus remaining the most important ‘player’ and arbiter in the ever-complex future world of broadcasting.

SmartResponse are pleased to announce today the launch of our new company website www.smartresponse.tv A deep felt thank you from us to all our Agency Clients, Retail Customers, Suppliers and Media Owners for all your support over the last four years since we launched SmartResponse back in 2015 as a specialist DRTV Advertising, TV Shopping and Retail agency – we very much appreciate it and are looking forward to working with you all in the future. For more information contact Pete Mills, Managing Director at SmartResponse Media: E: petemills@smartresponse.tv M: 07826 929 650 W: www.smartresponse.tv

Not a week appears to go by without a household name UK Retailer announcing a Creditors Voluntary Agreement (CVA), multiple store closures or in the most severe financial circumstances applying for administration/liquidation. It appears that virtually no established retail brand is immune to remedial measures to ensure commercial survival as the rapidly changing consumer landscape has caught large sections of the industry off guard, despite the warning signs and seismic shifts of consumer behaviour being in plain sight since the turn of the century. Transactional online websites started to enter into the mainstream of consumer usage just over 20 years ago in the UK, but many major Retailers were slow to take advantage of this new technical advance. Stalwarts including Marks & Spencer and Morrisons being prime examples of ‘late adopters’. They are now paying the severe price as they play catch up to the ever technically minded new generation of pure play online Retailers, and tech-savvy consumers who are migrating online in their droves, driven by value and convenience. As High Street trading continues to weaken in many parts of the country profitable bricks-and-mortar retailing becomes incrementally more challenging to attain for proprietors. Whilst some online retail sales can be argued to be incremental to the overall ‘take’ the reality is that the macroeconomic figures for the retail sector remain broadly the same – in short retail sales are still constant, but just derived from different sources. The decline of the traditional High Street is also exacerbated by oversupply of out-of-town retail space following the acquisitive ‘land grab’ of major retailers in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, leading to many Retailers occupying far too much physical space Vs. consumer geographic demand. As the recent spate of CVAs has shown, Landlords are being presented the Hobson’s Choice of either accepting large cuts in their long-term rental agreements, or their customers potentially going bust. The crux and challenge of the conundrum for retailers is to either invest and innovate, or to pay the price of standing still. There are many examples of successes in the sector during this epoch changing time, including Hotel Chocolat, JD Sports and most recently H&M, who have effectively and profitably embraced the challenge of multichannel retailing and continue to grow and expand. The alternatives, if Retailers are over dependent on bricks-and-mortar Vs. online sales, appear to be inevitably bleak. The latest figures from BRC Springboard Monitor convey a year on year 4.8% decline in footfall on the High Street. The future is commercially viable for the UK retail sector, but only if the physical space Vs. online sales conundrum is effectively tackled, and an efficient multichannel consumer offering is at the core of the retailer’s brand proposition and operations looking ahead.

SmartResponse Media announce that as of July 1st, 2019 they will be launching a new TV shopping station on the Sky Digital broadcast platform called SmartShop. SmartShop will broadcast from 6.00am-10.00pm daily on Sky Digital EPG channel number 686 and will feature the latest 30-minute infomercials from leading UK and international TV shopping specialist advertisers. Commenting on the launch of SmartShop, Pete Mills, Managing Director of SmartResponse Media, said: “We are very excited to be launching a new TV shopping channel in the UK market and are looking forward to making this a great success for all of our clients and advertisers looking ahead”. For more information contact Pete Mills, Managing Director at SmartResponse Media: E: petemills@smartresponse.tv M: 07826 929 650 W: www.smartresponse.tv

In a recent survey of major companies in the UK Amazon was unsurprisingly named as both the biggest threat and concurrent opportunity for their futures. The numbers are nothing short of staggering as Amazon can now claim to transact 49% of all online retail sales in the UK and continues to grow in both of its scale and multitude of services. This domineering scale, coupled with a generational change of digital consumption of products and services, only exacerbates the requirement for businesses to manage and engage with this fundamental change in the retail landscape. The monolithic and forever expanding Amazon retail online platform now creates a fundamental dilemma for businesses as their commercial choice is stark in relation to the binary trading options available. Option One – join Amazon and become either a wholesale supplier or vendor on their platform and increase retail sales dramatically, but ultimately forsake building their own controlled market share and guardianship of their own customer database. Option Two – try and compete on a ‘standalone’ basis and differentiate their consumer offer and customer proposition from Amazon and hope they can drive enough traffic to their own ‘owned’ transactional online website to mitigate this risk. There is, of course, a ‘middle ground’ that many brands maintain – operating their own transactional website, and also a large presence on Amazon too. By matching parity of pricing offers on both platforms they can concurrently thrive alongside one another. The challenge, however, continually remains that brands in their own operations must deliver to the precision ‘standard’ of Amazon in terms of timing, reliability and price. No easy task especially when Amazon continues to push their own ‘standards’ even higher – most recently offering delivery of selected items within two hours of ordering online. It would appear as Amazon continues its relentless march to grow their online global dominance that the options for brands to maintain their independence from the platform will become increasingly unviable as online shopping continues to grow in overall multi-channel terms exponentially year on year to 18.2% in 2018 (source: Office of National Statistics). The story for brands who have tried to ‘go it alone’ from Amazon – ToysRus being the most extreme recent example of failure – is increasingly a fight with an inevitable difficult ending for those concerned. The challenge for brands from Amazon is, of course, now not just online following their acquisition of Whole Foods Market in 2017 and many recent reports of them being potentially involved in bidding for other traditional bricks and mortar ‘household name’ retailers from the UK High Street, and the anticipated introduction of their own standalone physical retail outlets Amazon Go. The threat may be continually growing with Amazon, but for the nimble the opportunity continues to expand too…

SmartResponse, specialists in Direct Response TV and TV Shopping, are delighted to announce a new exclusive partnership formed with Direct Response Social Media buying specialists, Upbeat Agency. The SmartSocial partnership enables a cohesive approach to driving directly attributable return on investment from extended consumer touchpoints. The two agencies share a common commercial goal – to utilise cost effective media buying/planning, responsive creative and in-campaign optimisation, to generate directly attributable sales and profit for their clients. As a Facebook Preferred Supplier, Upbeat Agency have developed expert planning tools which drive huge response rates from Facebook and Instagram advertising. By utilising this social media buying expertise in conjunction with highly responsive DRTV advertising this combined coordinated marketing approach is set to be hugely profitable for their combined current, and future clients. For more information about SmartSocial please contact Pete Mills, Managing Director of SmartResponse, at petemills@smartresponse.tv

As the UK linear TV airtime market has declined in recent years, and online purchasing has become ubiquitous amongst the mass market, Direct Response Television (DRTV) advertising has experienced a major period of growth both in terms of scale and new creative formats. The growth of digital TV has led to there being a fundamental oversupply of TV channels with now over 650 populating the Sky Digital platform alone. Coupled with a change in the regulatory environment driven by the ‘Television Without Frontiers’ EU directive since the turn of the century this has led to a huge increase in DRTV and ‘teleshopping window’ airtime inventory in the UK at excellent value pricing. Prior to the advent of Sky Digital in 1998 DRTV advertisers were restricted to a very limited supply of DRTV airtime with a maximum length of creative of 120 seconds being available on any broadcast network. The costs of airtime were high and the ‘hit’ rate for any DRTV product or service was low. Infomercials had yet to hit the shores of the UK. From 1999-2002 alone the ‘Shopping’ EPG section of the Sky Digital platform grew from four to 38 dedicated TV shopping channels with the vast majority broadcasting pre-recorded 30-minute infomercials imported from the US. The new plethora of editorial TV channels introduced in the new digital dawn of TV in the early 2000’s concurrently embraced three hour ‘teleshopping windows’ carrying only infomercials as part of their daily schedules. DRTV was fast becoming a major force both in terms of size, scale, impact and awareness on the mass viewing audience. Over 200 channels in the UK including ITV, Channel Four and Five now broadcast infomercials daily. In more recent years the UK DRTV landscape has adapted again with the introduction of three minute ‘teleshopping windows’ across key TV broadcast networks running mini infomercials during key dayparts. This new three minute ‘teleshopping window’ airtime format typically trades at much better pricing than linear airtime – this material commercial factor coupled with the ability to include multiple ‘calls to action’ in the DRTV advertising creative has led to many clients now being able to generate net profit from directly attributed sales from DRTV campaigns alone. The DRTV advertising industry has previously been dominated by specialist DRTV brands including JML, High Street TV, Thane, BeachBody, Guthy-Renker, Shark and Timelife. In recent years many ‘household name’ brands are taking advantage of this new commercial opportunity and have now migrated significant media budgets to DRTV, as this new high growth media landscape continues to expand. Unlike many other media formats that are in perpetual decline (particularly press) DRTV airtime continues to grow and expand in the UK. In the last year 12-minute ‘teleshopping windows’ have seen significant growth and are now being carried daily on major mainstream TV channels. Further announcements are being planned by major channel owners for later in 2018 for yet more ‘teleshopping window’ airtime inventory to be opened up to the market. In these rapidly changing times when all companies need to be accountable with their marketing spends, the growing opportunity in DRTV is now open for all products and services to both generate creative direct profitable sales, whilst concurrently building their brand awareness. DRTV as a marketing format is flexible, inexpensive and a highly effective means to grow a profitable business for all brands.

Successful DRTV advertising has always been about marketing products and services for the lowest possible costs, especially where DRTV airtime is concerned. Any seasoned DRTV practitioner will always be far more interested, from a commercial perspective, in the low cost per thousand (CPT) of any airtime rather than the demographic details or specific ‘targeting’ of consumers – the very cornerstones of brand advertising. In addition, contrary to all theoretic strategies based on ‘brand building’, the best and most responsive DRTV adverts will create a profitable direct response on Day One of a given campaign – therefore negating the importance of ‘frequency’ or the consumers ‘opportunity to see’ a given creative. At SmartResponse the founders experience in all areas of DRTV advertising dictates that almost without exception DRTV advertising only ‘works’ when the airtime is bought against the broadest TV buying demo graph – All Adults – from Monday-Friday and from 9.00am-6.00pm. Buying airtime outside this DRTV paradigm has virtually never produced profitable results regardless of the type of products or services being sold via this specialist medium. In the somewhat crude, but effective, world of established DRTV media buying/planning techniques Video on Demand (VOD), when it first emerged, looked like something of a panacea. Maybe at long last VOD represented a viable alternative to the well-trodden approach to DRTV media buying that has formed the baseline approach for the industry for decades. There has always been an in built challenge to selling inherently ABC1 products and services using DRTV advertising when the parametres of ‘daytime’ viewing will inevitably create the self fulfilling prophetic audience that is inherently C1D2 – not a desirable target market for premium marketing. As consumers ‘on demand’ viewing continues to grow exponentially in the UK – it is forecast to reach 7% of all broadcasting in 2015 – so the commercial opportunity increases in tandem for advertisers. VOD, unlike traditional DRTV airtime, allows companies to target consumers with DRTV adverts with the utmost accuracy against target audience both via broadcast and on line via 4oD, ITV.com and the plethora of other VOD platforms now populating the converged media landscape. Coupled with the fact that the consumer has to view the given VOD advert as a ‘pre roll’ prior to any given specified TV programme guaranteeing viewing of the creative the future of VOD looked bright…. This all sounds therefore like VOD may be the viable answer for companies with an upmarket proposition to use DRTV creative effectively – responsive content selling ABC1 products marketed directly to an ABC1 targeted audience. There is, however, one inherent market problem that will only be resolved by greater ‘supply’ and lower pricing for DRTV advertisers. The current CPT for any VOD campaign in the UK is normally 10 x the comparative cost of a normal DRTV traditional media campaign. Whilst the exact targeting and pre roll broadcast consumption of VOD may, on the surface, appear attractive until the CPTs drop dramatically for VOD it will remain a ‘brand building’ TV medium and return on investment in terms of net profit in crude DRTV terms will remain very difficult to achieve. What can members do? Members can follow each other, write and reply to comments and get notifications. Each member gets their own personal profile page that they can customize. Tip: You can make any member of your blog a writer so they can write posts for your blog. Adding multiple writers is a great way to grow your content. Here’s how to do it: Head to your Members Page Search for the member you want to make a writer Click on the member’s profile Click the 3 dot icon ( ⠇) next to the Follow button Select Set as Writer.

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.

SmartResponse is a brand new agency that has been founded by industry experts, Pete Mills and Hannah Treble, in the specialist field of DRTV advertising and TV shopping. Our commercial intention and company strategy is clear for SmartResponse – to make DRTV and TV shopping new and profitable direct sales channels for all our clients. DRTV and TV shopping has proven itself since its inception, with the original adverts being aired in the United States from as early the 1950’s, to be a business that requires absolute expertise and focus to ensure that all the four key elements – DRTV creative, media buying, ‘back end’ operations and live sales optimisation – working seamlessly together. Without complete focused coordination of these four concurrent elements then DRTV advertising and TV shopping rarely works…. The founders of SmartResponse have spent their careers working exclusively in the field of DRTV working firstly as Directors of JML, the ‘household name’ UK DRTV brand, and latterly founding and running The Broadcast House (part of the Specialist Works Group). During this journey working with hundreds of brands and companies they have developed an unrivalled commercial understanding of DRTV advertising and TV shopping working across a broad array of categories and sectors including retail, financial services, charities, travel and on line businesses. Our full service DRTV and TV shopping agency service at SmartResponse will allow clients to trial, develop and scale up this specialist marketing activity. We will ensure that the four key aspects of DRTV and TV shopping are coordinated to their optimum by the founding Directors ‘under one roof’ and fully in house at SmartResponse to enable this medium to become a key and major profitable source of profitable income to your business both in terms of DRTV broadcast activity and the high growth sector of online advertising. We very much look forward to working with you at SmartResponse…. For further information please contact Pete Mills, Managing Director of SmartResponse – petemills@smartresponse.tv or mobile 07826 929 650