10 Reasons To Use TV
It’s cheaper than you think
TV advertising is bought on a cost per thousand view basis. The rate is referred to as a CpT, but essentially it’s the same metric as CpM in other media.
On this basis, TV is about the cheapest medium you can buy, with ‘all adult’ CpTs being as low as £1.50 in special periods (immediately after Christmas, for example), and an average daytime price of around £3.00. Of course there are other audiences that we can trade against, and they are more expensive, but on a like for like basis the CpM/CpT for TV is by far the cheapest relative to any comparable medium. In fact on average, it costs just one half of a penny to reach someone via TV.
TV drives brand search
We speak to so many great companies who feel frustrated at having to compete for sector search in an increasingly competitive paid search environment.
Our answer: Drive brand search instead. It’s cheaper to acquire (CpCs should be far lower than for ‘sector’ search) and it’s great quality traffic.
How to do this? TV advertising.
So many of us now watch TV with our smart phones or a tablet (increasingly the former), that any hint of interest will provoke an instant search for your brand on a device that enables them to buy | sign-up | respond. Brand search traffic is great traffic. It typically converts at a high rate, dwell time is higher and the number of page views is greater.
TV has unbeatable scale
- TV can reach over 70% of the population in a day.
- It can reach 98% of the population across a month.
- TV viewing is stable, with only a 2% variance in 5 years.
- TV makes up 42% of an average adult’s media day. Simply put, TV is the king of scale.
Whilst for some younger demographics TV via on-demand services has become important they are still large consumers of linear TV, with on-demand adding to, rather than cannibalising, viewing.
TV commercials are cheap to produce
Modern production techniques allow high quality HD TV commercials to be produced at a fraction of the cost of similar creatives 10 years ago. Equipment that used to fill a room can now be replaced by a laptop.
Of course there are always ways to spend more. The sky will always be the limit. But, the important thing to bear in mind is that creative production needn’t be a barrier to entry as it was in years gone by.
Here’s a very rough run down of what the costs might be for various popular approaches:
- From £5k A simple 2D animation or graphics-based ad.
- From £10k More complex bespoke animation with graphics.
- From £15k A studio shoot with actors.
- From £30k Shoot on location** with actors.
- From £50k More complicated shoot involving several actors/extras.
The process takes 6 – 8 weeks from the time a concept is approved to having a finished commercial cleared for UK broadcast
TV brands are trusted brands
Clearcast, the body who must clear all TV commercials before they can be aired, make sure that messaging fairly represents the product or service being advertised. This is one of the reasons that TV advertising is so trusted. Whilst it’s true that the general public may not be aware of this process, they will have subconsciously become aware that claims made in TV ads are less outlandish than in other lesser mediums.
The advent of less stringently regulated mediums such as online display and paid social media have served to highlight this difference. In addition, because the general public still see TV as an expensive medium, there is a perception that TV brands must be large companies who, some may feel, are more trustworthy than smaller organisations.
In a recent survey 37% of respondents said that TV showed advertising that they trusted.
This compared with the next largest, newspapers, with 12%.
Just 3% said they could trust advertising on social media.
TV offers the best ROI
ROI is at the heart of everything we do.
But, perhaps there’s still a perception with TV advertising that it’s a bit of blunderbuss approach. Mass awareness, mass market? A grey area in terms of allocating marketing spend with nice, but too fluffy results?
Sound familiar?
A large research project covering a six year period within retail and FMCG categories found that TV produces the best return on investment of any medium, with £1.51 of profit for every £1 spent. The next best was print advertising at 70p profit for every pound spent.
Return on investment when using TV for pure branding might require a substantial research project, but the effects of TV during a DRTV campaign are immediate and substantial.
TV is targeted
If you think that TV is just shouting to the masses, think again!
With hundreds of stations across multiple genres catering for a multitude of interests, TV has something for everyone. That means advertisers can pick and choose, reaching the right audience in the right content at the right price.
At Chase Media we trade TV slightly differently. We don’t do agency-wide deals, instead we trade on a client by client basis, meaning that we’re only ever influenced by the data, not a pre-arranged trading deal.
Additionally, SKY AdSmart offers the ability to target audiences using a whole raft of demographic variables, even down to Mosaic groups. This technology allows neighbours watching the same ad break to see different ads. This is truly groundbreaking stuff, but it still takes an experienced team to assess the relative benefits of such technology.
So, precise targeting is possible, but could cost more. The real question then becomes “Is it worth the premium?” That’s where we can help. Why not contact us to find out more?
TV is trackable
Thanks to the afore mentioned trend of dual screening (watching TV whilst simultaneously using a mobile phone), it’s now easier than ever to track TV. A brand search or direct visit is almost instantaneous, so it’s possible to track the uplift in traffic very easily.
With our bespoke attribution tool we can overlay response data with TV viewing and cost figures, enabling us to generate a cost per acquisition for each and every TV spot on the schedule. It’s then possible to interpret the data so as to make improvements to future campaigns.
In addition, it’s now possible to use correlation analysis to establish the relationship between TV impacts and sources of traffic and hence predict, with great accuracy, the amount of traffic you can expect with an increased level of investment.
Our tools are game-changing and bring a level of sophistication to TV buying that marketers need when contemplating TV vs. other, more obviously accountable mediums (i.e. online).
Data gives our clients the confidence they need to invest in TV for rapid and sustainable growth.
TV ADs are not limited to TV
Different audiences consume media in different ways.
Within the AV marketplace in the UK this means more choice. Whether it’s catch up via broadcasters services (like ITV Hub, All4 etc.) or more obvious VOD like YouTube, there are a plethora of ways to utilise your TV ad, and the list is growing.
This means you can now extend your broadcast activity (bought at very cheap CpTs) into highly niche content relevant to your product or service (usually bought at a premium).
The combination of the two is extremely powerful and helps amortise the cost of creative production across more channels.
We can offer YouTube, ‘Broadcast VOD’ as well as other VOD channels bought programmatically. As a Google Partner agency we are experienced in the various display advertising options around the video content too. Overlays, TrueView etc. can all be put in place to further optimise ROI.
We make using TV easy
Although we’ve tried to avoid using hundreds of acronyms in this white paper, a few have slipped through the net! However, it’s always our intention to make TV advertising as clear as possible.
We’re used to working with clients who are using TV for the first time and nothing is too much trouble.
We are 100% transparent, meaning that at any time you can see all the paperwork relating to your campaigns. To our knowledge we’re the only agency that offers this in the UK.
We do all the hard work for you: We research, plan, book, traffic creative and analyse data for future planning.
In short, we aim to make your buying decision easy by providing objective, data-led recommendations.