TV, always the centre of attention

So I’ve just been reading another great article on the effectiveness of TV from the highly reputable Millward Brown, here’s the link, http://www.millwardbrown.com/Global/Blog/Post/2011-04-18/It-s-a-360-world-but-marketers-can-ill-afford-to-leave-TV-out-of-the-media-mix.aspx with a great response by Tess Alps.

 

I often have this debate with my clients that when measuring the effectiveness of TV you have to look at everything not each media individually. This is why you would never find TV being sold on a Per enquiry deal because it will always increase your responses across all the Media you use, even after the TV campaign has finished. I’ve looked after in the past some national DRTV advertisers spending in excess of 10 million a year, and they always looked at the whole picture and is the reason TV was always their lead medium.

 

In fact recently I was having a conversation with a DRTV advertiser and we were discussing his cost pre response for TV and how it was the highest of all his media but he also said that when he wasn’t on TV all his cost per response went up massively and so he couldn’t afford to drop it. I even had to stop myself from laughing when he still tried to tell me that his Google cost per response was so massively cheap compared to TV. Yet when I asked how he bought it nationally yet he only had responses from his TV regions, how he could contribute the cost of response to Google when it was quite clear that it was because viewers were responding to the TV ads, just not through his TV measurement of a free phone number.

 

It just goes to show, if you’re not looking at the whole picture you’ll miss the point. TV is still the most watched Medium and most engaging but that doesn’t mean viewers will respond in the traditional way of calling a free phone service, or may not even respond immediately, but when they do respond it will be because the viewer has remembers the TV advert or that they saw them on TV, and through that they have a higher opinion of that advertiser through brand fame and as TV is still seen as the most expensive medium even though the reality is quite different.