DRTV stands for direct response television, which is a slightly old-fashioned name for a simple idea: an advert whose job is to get people to do something straight away. If your background is in online marketing, it’s the nearest thing television has to a performance campaign, judged almost entirely on what comes back and what each response costs.
The term goes back to the days of “call this number now” adverts, when a phone number filled the screen and a room full of people were waiting to answer. These days the response is far more likely to be a visit to a website, a search or a download, and it usually happens on a phone that’s already in the viewer’s hand, but the principle hasn’t changed.
What makes an advert “direct response”
A response advert is defined by what it’s for, and that has very little to do with how it looks. There are three things you’ll find in every good one. The first is a clear offer, so that within a few seconds the viewer knows what you’re selling and why it’s worth having. The second is a reason to act now and not next month, which might be a price, a deadline, a free trial, or simply a problem the viewer would like to be rid of. The third is one next step, said plainly and left on screen for long enough to take in, and one really does mean one, because a web address, a phone number and a QR code shown together only compete with each other.
The reason to act has to be a real one as well, because every TV advert is checked by Clearcast before it goes on air, and a claim such as “half price” or “sale ends Sunday” needs evidence behind it. We deal with that side of things for you, and there’s more about it in what can you say in a TV ad?
None of this means the advert has to be loud or cheap-looking, and some of the best response adverts are well made, good-humoured and perfectly pleasant to watch. The Bed Experts had only ever run standard sale commercials on TV when we made an advert for them with their agency, Gibson Media. It opens with an alarm going off, which is there to catch the people who’ve stopped looking at the screen during the break, before the customer wakes up and turns out to be in the bed showroom. The campaign helped them to break their previous years’ sales records, which is as good a measure of response as a retailer could ask for.
How the airtime is bought
Because a response advert is judged on what it brings in, the airtime is chosen with one question in mind, which is what each response is going to cost. Traditionally that has meant daytime and the smaller channels, where the airtime costs less and viewers are more inclined to act there and then, the reasoning being that somebody half-watching a repeat on a weekday afternoon will pick up their phone more readily than somebody gripped by the last ten minutes of a drama.
The plan is also built to reach as many different people as possible, and not to show the same people the same advert many times, because most of the response to this kind of advert comes the first time or two somebody sees it. A 2015 study by the media agency group GroupM, commissioned by Thinkbox (the marketing body for commercial TV), looked at six advertisers who used TV mainly for this purpose, and found that approximately 90% of the response came after a viewer had seen the advert for the first or second time. After that they’ve either acted or decided not to, and the money spent showing it to them again could have reached somebody new.
Cheap airtime isn’t automatically the best value, though. The same study found that the evening peak is a particularly strong time for response, and that airtime late in the peak still offered a significant opportunity even when its higher cost was taken into account. A good media buyer treats daytime as a sensible place to start and lets the results decide where the money goes next, which is what our media buying partners do for our clients.
How it’s measured
The great attraction of a response campaign is that you can see what it’s doing while it’s still running. On traditional broadcast TV, everybody watching a channel sees your advert at the same moment, so a share of them reach for their phones together, and your website visits jump within a few minutes before settling back. If you lay the times your advert was shown alongside your website figures and your call log, it soon becomes clear which channels and times of day are bringing in the most for the least. That makes the campaign easy to improve as it goes, because the slots that aren’t earning their keep are dropped and the money is moved to the ones that are.
That minute-by-minute picture belongs to broadcast airtime, and the more targeted kinds of TV behave differently. With AdSmart from Sky, ITVX and Channel 4’s streaming service, the advert is delivered to each household whenever that household happens to be watching, so the response is spread across hours and days and shows up as a gradual rise, with no single moment you could point to. You’d judge that part of a campaign by the overall level of visits and enquiries while you’re on air, and by comparing the areas you advertised in with the ones you left out, both of which we’ve gone through in our guide to measuring a campaign.
The one part of the result that the advert can’t control is what people find when they respond. A burst of visitors who land on a home page with no sign of the offer they’ve just seen will mostly leave again, so the businesses that do best with response advertising tend to have the page, the phone lines and the stock ready before the first showing.
Who it suits
Response advertising suits a business with something specific to sell, at a price people can decide on without a family meeting. Online businesses are a natural fit, because the response is a click away and every visit can be followed through to a sale, and we’ve written a separate piece on TV for online businesses. It also suits anything with a date attached, such as a sale, an event or an application deadline. Clearing, when colleges and universities fill their remaining places each summer, is a good example, because the window is short and everybody involved knows when it closes.
It’s a good first step, too, for a business that’s testing TV and wants to see some evidence before spending more. It can work well for services people need rarely too, such as legal or financial advice, as long as the advert gives them a clear reason to get in touch now rather than later.
Where its limits are
Response advertising is very good at collecting customers who are ready, or nearly ready, to buy, and what it can’t do is go on producing more of them for ever. After a while you’ve reached most of the people who were ever going to respond, and each extra pound brings in a little less than the one before. That’s the point at which the businesses that keep growing start investing in being known and liked, so that there are more people ready to respond next time, and we’ve set the two approaches side by side in brand building or getting a response.
The two aren’t as separate as that makes them sound, because simply being seen on television makes a business look more established, whatever the advert is asking people to do. Now and then the instruction itself becomes the brand, and Direct Line is the best-known British example. It started in the mid-1980s selling car insurance straight to the public over the telephone, so its adverts had one job, which was to make the phone ring, and the red telephone on wheels that told viewers what to do next ended up as the thing everybody remembered about the company. The IPA, the trade body for advertising agencies, published a case study in 2004, written by one of Direct Line’s own agencies, on how the red phone helped to build the business.
Is it right for you?
If you need to see a return quickly, or you want proof that TV works before you commit to more, a response campaign is a sensible place to begin. Making TV adverts is our living, so we’re biased, but with this kind of campaign you’d soon see in your own figures if we’d steered you wrong. Tell us what you’d like people to do when they’ve seen your advert, and we’ll give you an honest view of whether a response campaign is the way to get it. Get in touch, or have a look at what’s the cheapest way to advertise on TV?
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