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TV Pitchman
TV still takes the largest piece of the media pie. Hands down. Will online ever catch up with that? Perhaps. Online advertising revenues are growing, and the market is becoming increasingly sophisticated and robust. In the meantime, however, it is important to not lose site of the most critical aspect of media- it must drive sales. The medium will not matter much if there are no transactions to show for it.
Recently, author Joel Comm, author of“KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays”, ran an advertising experiment comparing TV ads to online ads. He hired an ad agency to create a commercial then ran it nearly 250 times during a 10-day period in October on shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Fast Money, Man vs. Food, Mad Men, and Wall Street Journal Report, etc.
The ad offered a website where people could go to download the first two chapters of the book for free. There was no traditional request to buy and no toll-free number or any of the usual direct response fare. The ad was designed simply to drive traffic to the website in order to collect opt-in email addresses of potential buyers.
The result was shocking. There’s no telling the long term affect, but right now it looks very much like a failure. Despite 8.3 million impressions, the site got only 112 visits, and less than half of those people opted in to get the free download.
This may or may not be proof, but it certainly seems to indicate that old media calls to action do not translate to sales on new media. People who watch TV may only rarely take note of the ad, and they aren’t motivated to go online as a result. TV is about branding and keeping a brand in the forefront of a consumer’s mind. It isn’t really about shopping. When it is (i.e. infomercials), the viewer is preconditioned and much more apt to take the next step. That next step is normally picking up the phone, not booting up their computer.
When the same ad ran on YouTube, it got 5,000 views and 1,375 visits, a conversion rate of almost 33%. More than half the visitors requested the two free chapters, and it didn’t cost a cent to run the video on YouTube vs the price of buying commercial time on TV.
The trouble with TV commercials that send viewers to a website is that they require the viewer to make additional steps to get to the meat of the matter. Unfortunately, every extra step is another chance of losing the potential customer. With the increasingly high cost of paid TV media, it just may not be worth it.
So while more and more campaigns might be blending more and more types of media and including online as a serious component, it is important to consider the use and expectations of each. Reach and frequency never trump sales.
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