Robert Keitch, Chief of Membership & Brand, DMA

The power of integrating TV advertising with direct marketing

There’s nothing like a recession to focus the mind and demand a fresh perspective on perennial commercial conundrums. For marketers, this requires looking at new ways of how to maximise the return on investment for advertising campaigns. All media channels have well-recorded consumer response rates that largely remain consistent through time. Breaking out of the mould therefore requires innovation.

But before innovation comes insight. To help brands make an informed decision about how best to increase consumer response rates to TV advertising, ITV and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have joined forces to produce research on the ‘amplification’ effect of integrated TV and direct marketing campaigns.

Until now, there has only been anecdotal evidence that integrating TV with direct marketing media has a positive impact on response rates. Two such campaigns came to prominence after becoming category winners at the 2009 DMA Awards.

The first campaign came courtesy of Zurich Financial Services for the UK launch of Zurich Connect which specialises in quality car insurance. To stand out in a crowded market and get itself on the radar of consumers, Zurich undertook a direct response TV advertising campaign which drove viewers to their website. In the launch month alone, Zurich saw the volume of traffic to their website double and exceeded their sales target of 147,000 by 114 per cent.

Ford of Europe also saw amazing results from integrating TV with email, online, social media and direct mail in their campaign to launch their new Ford Ka. Targeting 20-somethings, Ford combined media to provide a number of platforms on which their audience could interact in novel ways with their latest model. During the course of the campaign, Ford’s Ka website received 1.2 million visitors from 20 countries, and 150,000 registrations for test drives. 

Whilst such cases studies and previous research indicate a positive relationship between TV and direct marketing channels, they don’t clearly demonstrate the amplification effect. Inspired by this promising nugget of information, ITV and DMA pooled their respective areas of expertise to produce the seminal Response TV report. For the first time, light has been cast on a phenomenon that has been largely unknown or ignored.

The findings of the report are clear: TV advertising campaigns that are combined with one or more direct marketing channel can generate consumer response rates of up to 60 per cent higher than those of standalone TV adverts. Of course, it is down to the expertise and creativity of marketers as to how they combine the strengths. But one thing is obvious: harnessing the power of integrating TV advertising and direct marketing is imperative for brands that are keen to get more bang for their marketing buck.

www.dma.org.uk