The Joys of Direct Response TV

TV used to be a fairly straightforward place. Adverts were designed to make consumers feel good about brands, move them up the consideration list and hopefully somewhere down the line help encourage them to buy the product or service.

But then two things changed. First phone calls became much, much cheaper - now only your granny needed to worry about the price of being on the phone for more than a few minutes.

The second factor was that now with multi-channel TV, there are many more channels awash with advertising airtime, creating a much lower entry point to TV for advertisers.

Putting these two factors together meant that for the first time advertisers could measure directly the impact their TV advertising was having simply by counting the number of consumers who called them. No more waiting for post-campaign research, recall measurements and the like. And now, with the growth of the internet, response is often to go online and search for brands or to directly to the brand's website. Various research sources show that TV has a very strong impact on search and that sites see a huge spike in traffic when a TV ad has just been transmitted.

And while the brand advertisers were happy to use the new channels in peaktime, daytime ad breaks offered the best place to experiment with the idea of measuring immediate response.

These ideas have caught on to such an extent that agencies estimate that the area has grown by around 500% in the last 10 years. Insurance companies, finance providers, travel operators, computer brands and charity fundraisers have all become regular users of Direct Response TV.

Direct Response TV is about exactly that, the opportunity for a commercial message to generate an immediate response. The ad will have a strong sales message combined with a prompt to call or get in contact via the web, mobile phone or interactive TV.

(excerpt from thinkbox.tv website, added 11 October 2009)