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