The power of thinking like a client never becomes more apparent than when you actually become your own customer.  We recently established a venture to explore marketing direct-to-consumer products; through this venture we have been exploiting our own Direct Response TV capabilities.

In a multi-channel marketing campaign leveraging radio, television, print and web, it becomes critical to correctly attribute the campaign impressions and sales so that channel performance can be established, measured and improved. Being an Accountable Direct Response  TV and Radio agency, it is always our preference to be using well-defined methods for measuring the efficiency of media and creative. Recently, though, we ourselves have been experiencing the challenges that this can create when launching fully-integrated campaings.

A commonly discussed metric is the volume of sales coming from the web as a response mechanism compared with the volume from Toll Free Numbers (TFN) that are attributable to Direct Response TV.  We have seen time and time again that consumer behavior is shifting towards using the web as a preferred response channel.  They are searching for both information and a buying experience online, rather than simply being compelled to pick up the phone.

This shift to the web as both an information resource and as a direct purchasing mechanism introduces a challenge for response attribution of Direct Response TV campaigns. Traditionally, unique TFNs are used to identify specific media and creative intersections, enabling traffic spike matching to media schedules. On the web, organic search has become the rule.  A large proportion of people no longer enter a URL into a browser address bar.  Instead, they enter text into a search bar. Winning this search result has now become critical for capturing the web response from your Direct Response TV campaigns. If you choose to use multiple campaign microsites, or unique URLs for each creative, this simply increases the challenge.  You now must ensure the each URL and branded message is “Won” in search.

Today, integrated campaigns supported by a single agency that can effectively merge all media traffic have the advantage.  It becomes much easier to directly attribute the success of each activity; blending together the results of each channel to see the overall campaign performance. This, however, is rarely the environment in which many advertisers land.

Although the single silver bullet has yet to be found, the challenge forces innovative Direct Respsonse agnecies to think like a customer and to understand the need for rapid results. Traditionally, most of the industry has operated under the belief that attempting to glean insights by analyzing results on a week-by-week basis was sufficient. I am thankful that Marketing Architects thinks differently on this topic. We believe in the power of rapid results analysis.  Being able to see response traffic variations rapidly allows us to rebalance campaign spends across channels, as well as providing our advertisers with another arrow in the campaign quiver to target the creative and media channels that generate the greatest revenue growth and long-term ROI.

Over the coming months we plan on continuing to improve upon the speed of analysis with a goal of being able to provide our clients with the real-time insights that will allow them to drive their business successfully.