In the past five years or so, the US market has seen the emergence
of what they now like to call ’transactional television’ - television as
a direct sales medium. And we’re not just talking about ’this is not
available in any shop’ CD collections of instantly forgotten mood
music.
Year by year, US companies have been expanding the boundaries of what
can be sold off the screen via a number of routes - home-shopping
channels, direct response television (DRTV) and its extended format
cousin, the 30-minute infomercial.
We’ve seen something of that here, of course. But there’s a nagging
suspicion that our version of transactional TV is missing the point
somewhat. A few weeks back there was a lot of fuss about the latest leap
forward in UK television advertising - the ’corporate infomercial’. This
phenomenon is, perhaps predictably, only three minutes long and doesn’t
actually attempt to sell anything.
But UK commercials featuring direct response phone numbers account for
12 per cent - pounds 380 million in absolute revenue terms - of
commercial airtime.
A recent report from the ITV sales house, Laser Sales, puts this into
context. It pointed out that the primary objective of the majority of
these spots is ’to deliver and build a brand or corporate message in the
form of ’this company is responsive, approachable and open for
business’’. It called this phenomenon ’brand-response TV’.
Last week, ITV announced it is setting up a service offering a generic
telephone number that can be used for all direct response advertisers
and those mainstream advertisers who want to offer customers the
facility to request further information on their brands (Campaign, 5
December).
The call-handling technology for ’Call ITV’ directs the caller instantly
to the right destination, and the number - 0870-3333 333 - is deemed to
be so memorable that viewers will call at their leisure rather than
clogging the lines at peak time.
As David Stubley, the managing partner of CIA Conzept, points out, there
is a small but growing group of advertisers who could benefit from the
ITV service. These are advertisers who want to generate customer contact
but lack the resources of a Direct Line Insurance to cope with peak-time
response. There are a lot of smaller insurance companies in that
category, as well as catalogue companies like Grattan. ’ITV is probably
selling to them but they’re telling ITV that they can’t commit to the
network because they’d find it difficult to cope with the kind of
response that it might generate.’
But there are drawbacks, he points out: ’Other television stations will
never run the ITV logo, so how do you go about building a consistent
DRTV presence?And what do you do about response from print media?
Lastly, who owns the data about level and type of response? If it was
ITV, that would put advertisers at a greater disadvantage when it came
to negotiating rates.’
Claire Myerscough, the head of Zenith Direct, is less convinced about
the direct sales benefits. ’A lot of advertisers are precious about
having and developing their own telephone number. This service probably
won’t interest them. But there are companies that are expanding but
don’t have the facilities or call-handling expertise.
’For instance, some major fmcg companies who are soliciting a response
are still amazingly unsophisticated in this respect.’ And, warns
Myerscough, ’when an advertiser can’t handle response, inviting it can
be really damaging.’
She concludes: ’I’d see this as an extra ITV service for those sorts of
advertisers. I can’t see this as something designed to take a greater
share of genuine DRTV advertising, but it will help to keep ITV at the
front of people’s minds.’
