If your customers find you online, buy from you online and never set foot in a shop, it seems logical that your advertising should all be online as well, where you can see every click and you only pay when somebody shows an interest. And yet online businesses are among the biggest spenders on television. In 2021 Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial TV, published Nielsen figures showing that businesses which began life online had become the biggest category of advertiser on TV over the first seven months of that year, ahead of food and finance. Companies that measure everything they do wouldn’t keep spending that money out of nostalgia, so it’s worth understanding what they get for it.
Online advertising has a ceiling
Search advertising is brilliant at catching people who are already looking for what you sell. The trouble is that there are only so many of those people in any month, and every one of your competitors is bidding for the same ones, so sooner or later you find yourself paying more and more for each new customer while the growth levels off.
A good share of the customers your search advertising claims were also going to find you anyway. They typed in your name, saw your advert sitting above your own free listing and clicked on it, which means you paid for a visit you’d have had for nothing. The best-known test of this was carried out at eBay, where economists paused the company’s search adverts in a series of large experiments and reported that adverts on its own brand name had no measurable short-term benefit. Very few businesses are as well known as eBay, so yours might not see quite the same result, but it’s a fair illustration that search advertising is much better at collecting demand than at creating it. Creating it is the job TV does well, because it reaches people who weren’t looking, tells them you exist and gives them a reason to remember you.
The comparison site and the meerkat
The most famous British example is a price comparison website. At the start of 2009, comparethemarket.com was one of several comparison sites with similar names and a similar service, in a market where the customer had little reason to prefer one over another. That January it launched a TV campaign, created by the agency VCCP, about a meerkat called Aleksandr Orlov who was tired of people confusing his own website, comparethemeerkat.com, with theirs. By August, according to Hitwise figures reported by Insurance Times, comparethemarket.com’s share of the market had grown by 76 per cent since January, while its three main rivals had all lost ground.
Nobody was searching for meerkats before the campaign, which is the point of the story. Television gave millions of people a name they’d remember and a reason to type it in, and the search engine was only where they went to act on it.
What happens when an online business goes on TV
You don’t need a meerkat for the same thing to happen on a smaller scale, and the effect shows up in places you can already see. More people search for you by name, because they’ve seen the advert and gone looking. More people type your address in directly, and those visits cost you nothing. Your other advertising tends to work harder as well, because people are more likely to click on an advert from a name they recognise.
There’s research on how large the effect can be. In a study of ten online businesses, carried out by the consultancy Magic Numbers for Thinkbox, TV was behind 42 per cent of the visits to their websites, and most of those visitors arrived by searching for the brand or going straight to the site. Thinkbox paid for the work, and the ten were chosen as businesses that had grown their traffic through TV, so it’s better read as a picture of what TV can do than as a forecast for everyone. What it shows clearly is the route the visitors took, with TV creating the demand and search being where a lot of it turned up, which is worth bearing in mind the next time your search campaign reports a good month.
Seeing it in your own figures
An online business is in a better position than most to measure TV, because all of the response lands in one place and you’re already watching it. What you should expect to see depends on how the airtime was bought.
On traditional broadcast TV, everybody watching the channel sees your advert at the same moment, and most of them have a phone within reach (we’ve written about that in does it matter if viewers are on their phones?). Some will be on your website before the break has finished, so you’ll usually see a jump in visits in the minutes after each showing. With AdSmart from Sky and the broadcasters’ streaming services, such as ITVX, each household is shown the advert whenever it happens to be watching, so the response shows as a gradual rise over the weeks of the campaign, with no particular minute to go looking for.
Either way, the slower measures matter as much as the quick ones. Searches for your business name should grow over the weeks you’re on air, and Google Trends will show you that for free. If you advertise in one region, you can compare its visits and orders with a region where you didn’t, and it’s always worth asking new customers how they heard about you. We’ve covered all of this in how to measure TV advertising.
What kind of advert works
An online business usually wants two things from TV, which are visits now and a name that people remember later. It’s tempting to try for both at once, but they call for different approaches, which we’ve explained in brand building or getting a response. The Magic Numbers study recommends an order for a business that’s new to TV. It suggests beginning with adverts built to get a response (we’ve explained those in what is DRTV?), shown in lower-priced airtime where you can test and learn, and moving towards brand advertising once extra spending stops bringing in extra visits.
That isn’t the only way round, and some businesses come to TV with a brand job to do from the start. PC Specialist build PCs and laptops to order, and when we worked on their national campaign with their agency, Forward & Thinking, the brief was to change the idea that a custom-built machine is only for gamers. You can read how we went about it on the PC Specialist page.
Whichever kind you make, your name has to be easy to say, easy to spell and easy to find, and it should be spoken in the advert as well as shown. If people have to guess how your web address is written, some of them will end up somewhere else.
Where to start
You don’t need a national campaign to find out whether TV works for you, and since we make TV adverts for a living and can’t claim to be neutral, you shouldn’t have to take our word for it either. A test in one region, or to a chosen set of households, is enough to show you the effect on your traffic, and it leaves you with the rest of the country to compare against. Get in touch if you want to talk about what a test might look like for your business, and we’ll give you an honest view of whether it’s the right time.