DRTV
Direct Response TV (DRTV) advertising is all about driving an instant response from a TV Advert.
What is DRTV?
Direct Response TV (DRTV) advertising is all about driving an instant response from a TV Advert. This can be requesting a phone response, downloading an App or directing a customer to a website. This type of advertising requires specialist skills as it’s about getting people to act now and do something. This requires the right message going out to the right customer at the right time.
At a glance
- Understand how DRTV can increase sales and demand for your product
- How time of day and types of programming can have a major effect on the impact of your DRTV campaign
- Watch some example DRTV ads
- Learn how we can track results and optimise the performance of DRTV campaigns
What are the benefits of direct response TV advertising ?
There are a number of benefits from DRTV:
Customer acquisition
Direct response advertising creates an instant action to drive sales. It drives actual leads to interact with the advertiser either via a telephone response call or text or driving a website response, bringing leads directly into the sales funnel to convert to customers. Telephone response is a very powerful tool to let your salesforce convert leads into customers with a focused sell. If you get a potential customer to your website then you can then bring more product benefits to life to elevate the messaging from the advert to drive sales. Also any traffic that is driven to the website can be re-engaged with through various techniques of data capture such as email or retargeting leads with digital advertising. These retargeting routes make sure you get as many customers as possible from the leads.
Tracking DRTV results
What returns did my TV campaign drive is always a question marketers ask and with DRTV the results are easy to track. The whole point of the direct response advertising is to drive response. This means topline we can map out the responses from the campaign against the value of the campaign. However this is just the start of the analysis. When a DRTV spot goes out the exact time of the spot is noted along with the size of the audience and so responses can actually be attributed to a specific TV spots. We can scale up the parts of the TV campaign which are working and remove the parts which aren’t.
Ability to test
The cost of trialling DRTV is lower than you think. What we are trying to do is to drive response from a consumer, track this response and evaluate it. We are not measuring anything but response so we just need to invest enough in a test to make it robust and scalable. We have launched many brands from small DRTV tests and increased spend from the £20,000 test into spending over £500,000 a month. If you have a product or service that can fly we have the expertise to make it grow. We have launch packages on the website to get you started here from £20,000 to include an advert, the airtime and the analytics to grow your business
What types of brands can benefit from DRTV advertising?
Any brand that has direct sales channels can benefit from direct response advertising. Many big brands run direct response TV campaigns alongside other more branded media channels. Remember this is about getting a customer over the line to interact with your product directly. If you have telephone sales people and/or ecommerce website then DRTV can be for you.
Direct response TV commercials
Creating a direct response TV Commercial is a specialist skill and we have experts in this field. Its about creating a piece of advertising copy that delivers a call to action that is compelling and actionable right now.
Tots to Travel is a good example of a brand wanting people to explore their website:
While Treatwell wanted people to download their app:
Direct response TV buying
The main part of buying a direct response TV Campaign is driving responses for the lowest cost that we can. This means we have to think about who we want to see the adverts and at what time of day and what in what types of programming/channels
Audience targeting
Who is most likely to respond to the advert, your service may work for everyone but there must be a core audience that is most likely to respond. Is it male or female biased? Is it younger than average or older? Does the advertising copy talk more to a specific audience group than another?
There are over 200 TV channels in the UK all with different profiles. Once we understand who we are targeting this becomes our target audience to focus on. Agreeing the target audience means the can then plan the best channels to reach the audience most effectively at the cheapest price
Times of day to advertise
TV Channels price their advertising costs by times of the day. Advertising in the daytime 0900-1730 is the lowest cost time bracket. This means if we want to maximise the amount of our target audience that see the advert then a daytime only plan will achieve this. Advertising in the daytime is also the most responsive time to advertise: the daytime TV audience is not as engaged with the programming as generally as its showing repeated programmes which people may have seen before or are familiar with. People tend to watch daytime TV to alleviate boredom so if we can deliver a highly engaging message about our product then we are bringing something new and exciting to be engaged with so a win-win.
Types of programming to use for DRTV
We want a viewer to react instantly to either make a phone call, text or go to a website to start engaging with our brand. This means that they have to be watching programming that they like but do not love. A centre break of Coronation Street , the X Factor final, the Rugby Cup final are all extreme examples of programming that is terrible for DRTV. These are examples of shows that have the highest viewer engagement so to get them to switch out to engage with our brand is highly unlikely. We use the phrase wallpaper TV to best describe programming that we want to target. TV can be just used for company and people do actually like watching programming that they have seen before. Repeats of shows are the best options for DRTV buying. Programming that people do not mind zoning out and tuning into something new like engaging with your brand. People love the new and exciting and the chance of a bargain. If you have the product that is going to help, engage, delight, make life easier, save time or money for someone then let’s give them the option with a DRTV campaign.
How do you track DRTV advertising response?
Tracking DRTV advertising is taking all the response data available and matching it up against the media schedule. It is possible to match up responses to each individual TV spot that is broadcast. There is a bit of a science behind how this works and depending on the response data we are tracking bespoke analysis is sometimes needed. In the most simplistic form is looking at the analysis of a call only response campaign. To analyse this style of campaign we would need a list of the time stamped calls generated. This would be then matched against the spots that the campaign delivered to attribute calls to spots. We know the size and profile of all the TV spots in the campaign 8 days after the spots have gone. Combining these 2 data sets, responses and size and profile of the spots means we have all we need to track the responses and analyse the data. We match up the list of all calls generated by all the spots and the size of the spots. This gives us data on each individual TV spot shown and the cost per response generated by that spot. Once we have this data set we can then start to look at cutting it in different ways, by daypart, by channel, by day of week, by audience profile to look for patterns. What we are trying to find are the opportunities that deliver the most response for the least cost. Reducing the cost of acquisition is at the heart of DRTV tracking and analysis.
Why do you need an expert to buy DRTV ?
Every client is different but all want the same two things:
- the maximum return on investment for their DRTV media spend, and
- the ability to grow.
We are experts in building on test campaigns. Being given the wrong advice for your first campaign can mean you do not get meaningful response data at the end of the campaign so you will have learnt nothing and may lose faith in DRTV. How your first DRTV campaign is set up in terms of targeting and level of investment required is not a one size fits all option and needs collaboration and expertise. We need to understand more about your business to be able to plan a DRTV campaign effectively. We have worked with new to market clients and more established businesses and all in between so are very experienced in this area. We need to be able to track measurable responses against media bought so how do we get meaningful response data.
Want to explore DRTV ?
Our expert team are here to help.
Whether you need a powerful advert to get prospects to take action, or need to get your campaign in front of the right audience, say hello.
Enquire about our all-in-one TV advertiser starter packages.
