The stars come out for Max

Our TV Manager, Vicky Nunn, was at the recent IoF - here are some of her thoughts:

At the this month’s Institute of Fundraising conference, Max Clifford the PR guru opened up proceedings with a presentation dealing with the use of celebrities in the fundraising areana. With 40 years of experience, he talked a lot of good sense such as making sure the celebrity has a real and genuine connection with the charity. Also, you’re more likely to enlist the support of a celebrity, if you ask for their help on a particular aspect of the charities work.

As someone who has been buying TV airtime over quite a few years this has led me to think why it’s very rare to see commercials feature celebrities. Sure there are a few celebrity voiceovers but not a full blown personal appeal. The last one I can remember is Davina McCall, who featured in the Action for Children commercial.

Why is this?

Maybe charities appreciate Mike Masnick (Techdirt.com) point of view that today's consumer is a totally different animal than the consumer of even five years ago. This means that what was effective and influential five years ago is not necessarily so today, as today's consumer is more likely to be influenced by someone in their social network than a weak celebrity connection.

Today's consumer is informed, time-compressed, and difficult to impress, and they are only influenced by ads that are relevant and provide information. They don't want to have products pushed at them, even from a celebrity. In fact, the data show that relevance and information attributes were key missing ingredients from most celebrity ads. There is no reason why this is not true about fundraising commercials.

Oh and there is always the Tiger Woods/Ryan Giggs scenario to put you off...

World Cup Review

World Cup 2010 was last night brought to an end by a Yorkshireman amid eruptions of celebration around the stadium; unfortunately the Englishman was the referee and the fans in rapture were the Spanish.

World Cup 2010 began 11th June 2010 with thirty two teams in the group stages; it will be remembered for the early exits of holder’s Italy, the sullen French and another year England failed to deliver. The World Cup was viewed by a collective audience of approximately 26 billion, once again underlining the opinion that the World Cup is the largest worldwide event and therefore for those in marketing and media, every four years it’s ‘all systems go’. A well-placed advertising campaign during this period of time is guaranteed to have the largest audience than any other time, equally a media gaff on the scale of ITV HD ‘0-1 USA win’ after cutting to an advert and missing England’s goal, can be catastrophic. A major issue faced by an advertiser is the thrashing that ITV took in the ratings battle with the BBC, many citing the lack of advertising being a major pull for their 54 percent share of those viewing the final. 3.3 million viewers tuned in to watch the final on ITV and ITVHD compared to the 15.1 million on BBC and their HD channel. Therefore it seems clear that although the World Cup is the largest sporting event on the planet, the media and advertising world must be creative and not merely bombard the viewer with television advertising, as they will ultimately switch over. To put the efforts of ITV in perspective, the highest recorded ratings of Coronation Street is 27 million; room for improvement indeed.

Peter Bradley, Trainee MC&C

What should digital TV really look like?

The kind folk at Broadcast magazine recently asked me to act as one of the judges for their Digital Broadcast Awards. It was a fascinating afternoon with, as you would expect, some excellent entries.

My first thought though was: why “digital”? I was told that the awards were about content aired on digital terrestrial channels which of course encompasses anything from BBC 1 and ITV to more niche channels like BBC parliament and FiveUSA as well as various shopping and information channels.

But these days, “digital terrestrial” seems a slightly out of date and artificial set of channels to base an awards ceremony around.

OK they are all free, which is, I suppose, a point of difference. But there are many “TV channels” that are now available purely online while others provide so much content online that you don’t really need a TV to watch them (although of course you still need a TV licence!).

Restricting the awards to purely “digital terrestrial” means that anything winning a “Streamy” award wouldn’t be included for the Broadcast awards.

I am not sure if all that’s particularly important. But it did nake me think about the nature of TV programmes on a digital platform and how they can be developed beyond simple long form TV to enhance the viewer’s experience.

And looking at some of the entrants to the Digital Broadcast Awards helped me identify some of the possibilities.

As well as programmes that make no attempt at online enhancement, there seem to be two aproaches, one which we might call “normal” and one which is very definitely "advanced".

Normal enhancements

There is a “normal” level that looks pretty like the “extras” you get when you buy the DVD of a movie.

• You get the long form video (of course)
• You probably get some additional editorial, perhaps some short form clips and out-takes, pictures and text based bckground
• And you are pretty certain to get one or two more interactive elements: voting perhaps, a forum where you can submit comments, even the opportunity to upload your own pictures or video
• The channel might also market the programme by uploading clips and information to other, third party sites such as YouTube where more people may discover it

Advanced enhancements

But increasingly many programmes are developing advanced online content and applications that really blur the boundaries between the long form TV video format and online interactive formats.

Thus some programmes:

• Use viewer interactions or feeds from Twitter and other sites to tweak story lines
• Create immersive video games based around the programme
• Provide alternative storylines and extra characters online
• Merge the real world with the programme by for instance sending emails to registered viewers from characters in the programme
• Introduce new characters (or even the whole programme) online before they have been seen on the programme

These advanced enhancements are where the real creativity will be seen over the coming year or two. With the rapid acceleration of the long awaited “convergence” between online and TV (as witnessed by the launch of internet enabled TVs) perhaps this area should be the focus of future awards.

It is certainly the area that programme makes should focus on!

Jeremy Swinfen Green, Digital Director

jeremy@mcand.co.uk

TV Response: the new rules

So last Thursday Louise and I went to a Thinkbox event entitled ‘TV Response, the new rules’.

Not since the late 1990’s has any real research been done into DRTV and how response is being generated, so we had high hopes that this could back up all that we say on a daily basis to our clients. On a basic level it did – so hoorah!

The findings stated that, of all response to a campaign, only 15% came directly from the telephone – mmm not a lot then! Essentially this means that the CPR of a campaign can be over-stated by as much as 85%.

Now the difficulty with this research is that the clients included (anonymously of course) were not all pure DRTV clients. One who chose to wave anonymity was Honda and I don’t think they could even class themselves as a BRTV client! So possibly the 15% could be increased for many clients – maybe to as much as 50%. Where does the other response go?…

Well no surprises: for the bulk – it's online of course… We have been seeing more and more that the use of paid-for and natural search running alongside a tv campaign has a significant uplift in response – but, hey, its always great to see some statistical proof of this!

According to the study 66% of web traffic during the analysis period came via a search engine, 16% recalled the URL from the ad while the remaining 18% guessed the URL!

We still know though that putting a URL on the ad does increase web response – but maybe that’s simply because they then know they can go online – think of it as a green light to search.

The web traffic came at different times to the ads themselves though – more in the evening and more at weekends – shifting the response patterns once again.

We came away with more questions than concrete answers – David Brennan from Thinkbox summed up the findings at the end of the event and his first two conclusions were really interesting

1) There are no rules!

2) We can’t totally control the routes to response – we need to allow for the fact that the stimulus and the route to response is far less connected than before

I know though that I for one would like to attempt to get some more answers from our own responses – maybe try to replicate the study but with pure DRTV brands.

Now then who’s up for that challenge?

Nicky Legg, Broadcast Director