TV advertising, Online’s greatest friend!

I was just reading this great article courtesy of Matt (Light Reading) Riches called “your Web metrics are wrong” by The Ad Contrarian.

Link to article 

http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2011/01/your-web-metrics-are-wrong.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FaDYs+%28The+Ad+Contrarian%29

 

And it’s something we have long know about in the TV world but it’s nice to hear about it from someone not in selling TV.

It’s very easy an advertiser to get caught up in the numbers. Numbers are important they control everything from currency to measurement; we pretty much rely on them for everything in our day to day lives. So it’s easy to get caught up in them when you’re looking at the results of your campaign and trying to work out where the best return came from. And it’s a common mistake to group different media separately, TV, Radio, Online, Press, Outdoor, Mail outs etc. What is often forgotten is the relationship between these different media. There have been many studies on how TV works well with other media. Below is a great link to some Thinkbox research on how well TV and online work together.

http://www.thinkbox.tv/server/show/nav.1019

 

But when you look at them separately Online would show as the most cost effective medium, but that is because viewers saw the TV advert and where directed to go online. It’s a common mistake in measuring DRTV campaigns. I have a few big clients who are very well known solicitors and we often chat about these sorts of results. The client will talk around cost per response for their TV being higher than anything else but their Google search results are so cheap it’s unbelievable. Then I’ll say but surely people searched for you online because they saw the TV advert. For example with this particular client they bought Google ad words nationally yet they only got responses in the Tyne Tees TV region which they bought. So surely when looking at the cost per response they should be combining numbers. I mean even Google have admitted themselves the power of TV and online.

 

“You may not believe this but last week I stood in front of a major media agency and 50 or so of their clients and sold TV.

 

I told them that TV & search are highly compatible & that money should be taken from below the line and pushed back into TV alongside (obviously) massive growth in search.

 

This is a common theme of mine as we see huge spikes in query volume following TV exposure both editorial & ads.”

 

Mark Howe, MD Google Media Sales

     

So lessons to be learnt, numbers are important but they don’t always tell you the whole story. I always tell my clients to look at relationships between their media not as individual.

 

Just realised telling the whole story is becoming a theme of mine; maybe I should change the name of my blog.

Has the Death of TV been exaggerated?

I was reading this article by Sarah Shearman about video views in the UK for this month which ITV did pretty well in, coming in at no.4 in the UK for video ad properties. And it got me thinking about how online advertising was always citied as the death of TV advertising (among with many other things, it changes yearly) but in fact it's been quite the opposite. Online has increased TV viewing. 
The recent success of "The Only Way is Essex" and Downton Abbey were partly because of the availability to catch up online through the ITV Player. I'm sure I saw a stat come thorough the office saying both programmes had over a million viewers each online after the first week so when you add that to the TV viewing figures its starts to look very good for TV. Especially when you consider most digital programmes in the UK do less than a million and in fact sometimes even the bigger channels struggle to deliver more than a million, in fact last night Men of Rock was new to BBC2 at 9 pm took an audience of 1.5 million.
I guess what I'm trying to say is TV is far from dead. And when you think of TV viewing you have to look at the bigger picture to see what's really going on. A lot of competitors always point out to the decline in audience on ITV1 shown through a nice chart showing our viewing figures over the past 20 years (although last year it was up). But what you have to remember is that our viewing figures don't just come through live TV now, but our +1 service or our digital channels and our viewers through ITV.com (which didn't exist 20 years ago). In fact if you added them all together the combined audience we can deliver is very impressive still. 
So next time you plan a TV campaign remember that TV advertising doesn't just come through your TV but your computer too and soon the two will merge back together again with IPTV's and new services like YouView.  
Link to Sarah Shearman article below.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1049465/UK-racks-6bn-video-views-month/ 

TV Advertising, not as Expensive as you might think

I thought I'd start my first post by dispelling the biggest myth that TV advertising is expensive.


Because of the high profile that TV adverts have and the fame that they create it's no wonder that your first impression maybe that it must be very expensive. Those glittering ads by M&S must cost millions and they always seem to be on in all the best programmes, which must cost tens of millions. Well maybe not tens of millions, but that's because M&S have the money to spend.


But if you asked me, could I plan a TV campaign for less than 10k including production. The answer would be yes, in fact I do several times a day for local advertisers in the Tyne Tees region. In fact sometimes I do it for less than 5k. But now your probably thinking but surely that would buy me only one ad in Jeremy Kyle, not so.


Currently in the Tyne Tees region we offer split transmitters so you can target your advert to just the North or the South of the region. The North covers, Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland etc roughly about 1.5 million Adults of which about 82% or so watch ITV on a weekly basis. Because your targeting a micro region the price is a lot smaller and for a budget of 7k for your ad campaign you would get roughly an estimated 9 peak adverts and 16 off peak which would include programmes such as Coronation St, Emmerdale, Take Me Out, The Chase, Above Suspicion, This Morning, Jeremy Kyle, Loose Women etc. And you could have a live action advert made for about 3k.


Now you’re probably thinking though but I don't want to be a local advertiser I want to be national and that does cost millions. Again you would be wrong any budget can be accommodated, national campaigns on our digital channels can easily be bought again for about 25k for a two week campaign. And a national campaign needn’t cost millions if planned correctly. By buying at the right time of year, being creative with your time length, choosing the right time of day to be on air or the right programmes to advertise around and the right TV regions to be on.


Quite often sponsoring a TV programme is more affordable than buying the equivalent number of spot adverts. And soon we will be adding product placement to the mix which I’m really excited about.


The point I'm really trying to make is not to discount TV advertising as an option as you do so at your own peril because anyone with some good TV buying knowledge could quite easily give several options to match almost any budget. In fact if you don’t believe me give me a brief and I’ll prove it.