integrated marketing

Lee Weinblatt reports that when TV advertising is paired with internet direct marketing, both strategies benefit.

Thirty-nine national and local advertisers participated in the test, including Colgate, Pepsi, Neutrogena, Subway, Chevrolet (Omaha), Burger King (Omaha) and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Advertisers compared the impact of different commercial lengths and different time placements, the impact of frequency on zapping and the effect of different executions. The results show that interactive marketers can bypass the expense of paying for listings on search engines and tie the branding of TV more closely to the information on their websites. 

The test generated enormous amounts of information, with surprising results:

• Television commercials are more than twice as effective when tied to rewards and incentives. 
• Viewers of non-primetime DVR-recorded programs (like afternoon talk shows) are more likely to go to an advertiser's website for more information than viewers of primetime programs-- even if it is the same commercial aired in a different time slot. 
• Over 67 percent of householders in the test downloaded offers tied to encoded TV commercials, with no difference between DVR and non-DVR owners. 
• A total of 60 percent of HH responding to a post-test survey said they redeemed more coupons as a result of decoder offers than they had done without offers. Coupon redemptions were as high as 53 percent (Burger King), far in excess of the average redemption rate for newspaper coupons of less than one percent. Further, MediaCheck offers drove up to 55 percent of recipients to advertiser websites (Neutrogena). In addition, 79 percent said they were more likely to watch a commercial that has an offer tied to it than one that doesn't. 
• Leading a GiftzClub (website) offer with the word "free" increases response rates significantly over ads that subordinate the "free" message. 
• The heaviest users of GiftzClub coupons were householders with incomes greater than $50,000 per year. In the test, a total of 55 percent of total householders had incomes greater than $50,000 annually, and 94.2 percent have two or more televisions. About 71 percent watch 21 or more hours of TV per week. Sixty-three percent have cable-provided internet, while 22.5 percent rely on dial-up service and 12.2 percent on DSL.  
• Prime time is not necessarily the best time to reach consumers. It turns out that pre-prime viewers are more receptive to advertising messages. 
• Zapping and zipping of television commercials can be significantly reduced, even among those with DVRs. 
• Roughly 80 percent of the programs that were recorded on DVR and viewed later were primetime shows. Much of the balance was soap operas and afternoon talk shows.
• Viewers who watch DVR-recorded programs rarely fast-forward through the commercials when they are viewing. They typically use the DVR to control the time at which they watch a program. 
• A total of 71 percent of respondents to the survey reported that their viewing of KMTV, a CBS affiliate in Omaha that partnered with MediaCheck to perform the test, had increased during the test. 

Importantly, the test has also won the approval of its participants. A survey of 2,000 participants revealed that 87.5 percent of respondents would recommend the system to a friend. And 89 percent said they would be interested in participating if the test continued.

Here's how MediaCheck's technology works. The system uses a unique audio code for each commercial that is hidden, every second, within the commercial's audio track. A small decoder box records the code when a commercial plays on a home TV. The decoder box stores the timed code and then automatically sends this information to the family PC or a small direct "dial-in" box. In addition, as the encoded commercial airs, a green light blinks on the decoder box to alert householders that the advertiser is offering information or a reward, such as humor, songs or a coupon, along with the commercial. This is an inducement for consumers to visit their PCs, at their convenience. Their home computers automatically bring up a "GiftzClub" web page with rewards, contests, humor, coupons, store sales, brochures or other information based on the unique codes "captured" from the commercials. The unique codes, meanwhile, are downloaded automatically to MediaCheck's database and reporting system, which advertisers consult directly and daily to see how their TV commercials are doing in terms of cumulative reach and frequency of exposure.

Since the end of the Omaha test, MediaCheck has been working to line up partners for a second and larger implementation of this system. This test would reach 35,000 households nationwide and provide advertisers, for the first time, with a detailed understanding of how their commercials are working in multiple markets. This, in turn, would give them extraordinarily powerful tools to optimize ROI on TV advertising. It would also point to a way to a better system for TV commercial measurement that finally breaks from the flawed models that have driven the industry since the beginning. 

Lee Weinblatt, CEO of The PreTesting Company, Inc., holds 60 patents for technologies to measure the effectiveness of TV, print, radio and outdoor advertising. He co-founded The PreTesting Company in 1983 to commercialize his inventions.