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.