So why was the recall in the research so low and the actual response so high? I can think of three explanations:

First, we were targeting a large group of the population. It was possible that even though the hard data results were good, we were drawing our DM response from portions of the population that simply hadn’t been included in the sample.   If we had a 25% response then that was a record-breaker from a DM planning point of view, but it still meant that the vast majority of the target - 75% - hadn’t responded. Those that had engaged with the mailing were far more likely to recall it than those who had not. So if our sample happened to comprise of 85% or 90% of those who did not responsd, then the recall results would be much lower than the response actually experienced.

The second explanation is more intriguing. Could it be that even though 1 in 4 of the target had responded, those that did respond had failed to make the connection between the what they’d actually done and what the research was asking them? In this scenario the sample is accurate and reaching our 1 in 4 respondents, but those who had responded forgot that they had done so when asked in research. Had they failed to connect the research question to the campaign and to their response behaviour?

The third explanation is that some of the respondents deliberately disconnected their actual behaviour from the answers they gave in the research. In other words, they did respond, but they didn’t want to say so.  They were using the research as a communication channel to share a point of view along the lines of ‘I’m not going to tell you exactly what I did. What I am going to tell you is that I didn’t like being perceived to be in your target audience, or perceived to be the sort of person who would buy the sort of product you were offering’.

Whatever the explanation, this taught me an important lesson; market research and behavioural data can say very different things. Asking people what they did, or think they did, can be very different to what they actually did. If market research tells you something, take it as an indicator not a fact. If it’s something big, do more digging around the research before you act on it.  But if hard data tells you something, whether it’s good or bad, whether you like it or not, you can be sure that it reflects changes in actual behaviour, the ultimate measure of marketing success or failure.

1. Day of Week
2. Time of Day
3. Channel
4. Programme type
5. Time length of ad
6. Position in break
7. Position in programme
8. Diminishing returns (audience size)

How does DRTV Spot Matching work?

The established way to undertake these analyses is to use a technique called “spot matching”.   In simple terms, spot matching involves matching two files with each other. The first file is the DRTV spot schedule which contains spot transmission times, programme, channels, audience size and timelength. The second file is the response file which contains information about inbound response, the time of calls, and often the outcome of those calls e.g. whether it resulted in an action with value (i.e. became a qualified lead) or the call failed (i.e. caller not interested, hoax, timewaster etc).

How are the response files matched and reported?

The files are matched using a response curve.  It is generally accepted, from numerous research studies, that around 75% of DRTV calls occur within 15 minutes of spot transmission, and around 50-60%% occur within around 7-8 minutes.   By overlaying the response curve across every spot, it is possible to allocate calls to spots throughout the whole DRTV transmission schedule. When call volumes have been “attached” to each spot transmission, it is then possible to establish the call response rates for each spot.   This then enables reporting by time of day, day of week, channel, timelength etc.

Establishing Financial ROI

By multiplying spot audience volumes by the cost per thousand (CPT) rate at which the DRTV audience was bought,  we can establish the cost of each spot. Because we know the call volumes attached to each spot we are able to report cost per call by spot.  If the advertiser has a notional value that they can attach to a call with a positive outcome then it is possible to establish ROI based on the cost of call from each channel, time band, day of week, programme genre etc in order to report a ROI based on prospect value.

For more information on our analytics services visit www.teqtonic.com

Smart data analysis can be a major source of campaign insight and even competitive advantage for brands and advertisers. The customer data owned by a brand advertiser can reveal

• Exactly who buys a given product or service
• Detailed information about the characteristics of those buyers
• Which other products and services they buy
• Which product and service offers they find most attractive
• Which buyers buy more of certain types of products
• How you can find more buyers with the same characteristics

These data analysis techniques can be applied to all types of customer data – whether it’s for a retail business, an online business or a call centre based business. Insight from data analysis can be applied across a wide spectrum; from adding inspiration to a creative brief through to changing a company’s entire business strategy.

You may think the claim that data analysis can change the destiny of a business is rather grandiose. But I can can think of two examples of breakthrough data insight from the same category that ended up contributing millions in additional brand revenues.

Sainsbury’s  - Sainsbury’s agency AMV were tasked with increasing the then ailing retailer’s sales by £2.5bn over a three year period. A seemingly impossible challenge until viewed as a data question. The AMV team calculated that £2.5bn equated to £833m per year which in turn equated to £16m per week.  It still looked like a big number until the AMV team considered that Sainsbury’s handled 14m customer transactions per week.  Then the target equated to just £1.14 per transaction. The brief to increase sales by £833m per week could be redefined as increasing each existing transaction by just £1.14. Now the target not only looked attainable, but this data insight led to the idea that lots of small changes could make a big difference.  From this insight came the campaign idea that consumers should “Try something new today”. By asking customers to ‘try something new’ they were able to persuade customers to spend at extra £1.14 every time they shopped.

Tesco - The Tesco Clubcard is now legendary as both a customer loyalty card and a source of information about customers.  Up until the introduction of the loyalty card, many retailers didn’t know who their customers were. And if they didn’t know who they were it was difficult for them to gather the data that allowed them to understand individual customers better. With the Club Card this all changed. Tesco were able to develop individual data driven relationships with their customers.  They were able to understand customer needs better and in doing so they gained competitive advantage over their rivals.

For more information on our data analysis services please visit www.teqtonic.com

Typically, to be considered for project work, you will need to:

1. Be a strong numerate graduate - maths or statistics
2. Ideally have a postgraduate qualification in maths or statistics
3. Good working knowledge of SAS, Excel and PowerPoint
4. Demonstrate that you can apply your numerical knowledge in a marketing context i.e. experience of handling marketing data sets like customer databases, campaign performance data or web traffic data.
5. Be familiar with the techniques used to explore customer databases to generate insight that can be valuable to marketers and / OR
6. Have  a good working knowledge of the techniques used to undertake quantitative analysis of market campaign performance
7. Have experience of working with either advertisers, agencies, direct marketing agencies or digital agencies

From a more technical perspective our projects are likely to require the following skills:

1. Discovery:  Data Audit, Data Prep, Classification, Segmentation, Predictive Modelling. Good working knowledge of relevant SAS modules (Business analytics, data mining etc).
2. Evaluation: Descriptive Analysis, Multiple Regression, Time-Series Analysis - across either multiple media channels or individual channels like DRTV, DM or web. Good working knowledge of relevant SAS modules (Business analytics, forecasting).

If you think you have some of the qualities we value, please send your CV to Simon Foster on this email address: talk @ teqtonic.com

1. Article directories that publish original user generated content (UGC).
2. Blogs that feature original content and allow comment from users.
3. Blog aggregators like Technorati that allow members to bookmark, tag, syndicate and recommend blog content to other people.
4. File sharing sites with community and comment functions like YouTube and Flickr.
5. Forums that allow users to post within a special interest community such as Crackberry.com for Blackberry users.
6. Microblogging sites like Twitter and all associated sites like Tweetdeck that carry and syndicate content to their users.
7. Review sites for products and services (like Travelocity) that carry user generated content (UGC) and reviews.
8. Social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg that allow tagging and tag sharing so that other people can explore the same tags.
9. Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn that allow communities to manifest themselves online.
10. Wikis - online encyclopedias that can be edited by anyone - like Wikipedia

It’s worth noting that there are two critical components in social media, the 2 C’s: Content and Community. These are the two sides of the social media coin.

On the one side, content lies at the very heart of social media. Content populates all the components above, all of which would cease to exist without content. In the case of social media, content is often user generated (User Generated Content or UGC) as opposed to being generated by a professional publishing house.  If you are thinking social media in any way, you must be thinking content; without content there is no social media.

Community is the other aspect of social media.  Communities gather around people of similar types (alumni, workplace, school, product users etc) or common interests (stamp collecting, trainspotting, FX trading) in the same way that “birds of a feather flock together” in many other aspects of social sciences. Communities are also important because they create a demand for content as members seek opinions or seek to make their own views known. Without communities there would be less of the subtle “friction” that causes many types of content to be generated and consumed.

Jonathon Salem Baskin announced in his book that “Branding Only Works on Cattle”.

Before we get to the answer we have to have a working definition of what a brand is. Surprisingly, many business-people (not necessarily marketers) still think that a “brand” is a “logo”.  That’s not true.  Crucially, a brand is not a thing, it’s a set of perceptions that exists in the minds of consumers. A brand is a collection of perceptions about pricing, quality and consumption experiences. Brands are defined in consumers’ minds by the recommendations, criticisms, tastes, and “jobs well done” they themselves have experienced or heard about.  On top of all this, the brand logo is the “brand mark”. To use an analogy based on roads, the brand mark is the sign that says “M1″, but it’s not the motorway.  The product is the motorway, the brand mark is “M1″ and the brand itself is what people think and feel about the M1 as means of transport relative to other options.

Now let’s swing back to the Internet. The Internet is of course a glorious place where the consumer reigns supreme and the truths about products and services are revealed to all.  In this Utopian dream, companies, brands, corporates and institutions can no longer ‘hoodwink’ the consumer. Consumers can “talk directly” with brands and have a customised one-to-one relationship based on “digital conversations”.  All things from the past are now aged and obsolete

Well that’s one point of view. The Internet is also something else. It is a ‘cesspit of false information’. With no barriers to entry and nearly frictionless production and distribution, it’s easy for false information, lies, doctored images, and other forms of deception to infiltrate the Internet. Now that’s not my point of view, it belongs to Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google and the engineer of its post invention growth.   Yes, the Internet is also the home of spam, cloaking, deception, bank account thefts, fraud, consumer scams, false and misleading reviews, viruses, trojans, hacking and many other types of cyber crime.

So, where does this leave brands in the digital age?  I’d argue that the truths represented by brands coupled with the complexities of increased choice and the realities of the darker side of the Internet mean that brands are more vital now than ever before.  The world is getting more complex because more choice is being offered.  Many sources of products and information can’t be trusted.  Consumers use brands to help simplify decision making.  Brands are ‘the solution not the problem’ according to Eric Schmidt at Google, ‘brands are how you sort out the cesspool’.

Consider this. A £50k budget produces 460 sales but £100k only produces 530 sales. That means that for the second £50k, you only generate an additional 70 sales. The return from the second £50k is disastrous from an ROI perspective. The cost per sale generated by the first £50k is £108 but the cost per sale in the second £50k is £714.  Many agencies would simply report 530 sales from £100k giving a cost per sale of £188.  But that average cost per sale clouds terrible inefficiencies. It’s obvious that not controlling diminishing returns can seriously undermine campaign performance and have an even worse effect than running poor creative work.

Yet this area does not get anything like the attention it deserves in advertising and media agencies. How many times have you heard of incorrect budget allocation being cited as a cause of poor campaign performance? No often.  Agencies and advertisers usually seek to explain poor performance by factors like poor market conditions, uncompetitive offer, poor creative, weak targeting etc.

Joy Joseph of the School of Business at the University of Connecticut wrote a paper called ‘Understanding Advertising Adstock Transformations’ in 2005. In this paper she observes that “advertising can also have diminishing returns to scale or in other words the relationship between advertising and demand can be nonlinear. For example, the effect of 200 GRPs of advertising in a week on demand for a brand maybe less than twice that achieved with 100 GRPs of advertising. Typically, each incremental amount of advertising causes a progressively lesser effect on demand increase. This is a result of advertising saturation.”

To quantify these points she provides this example, “[If] for 100 GRPs the sales effect of advertising would be 4.6 units and for 200 GRPs the sales effect would be 5.3 units…… a 100% increase in advertising we would only have a 15% increase in sales”. In other words increasing budget clearly does not increase sales. What actually happens is that sales decrease with every additional unit of spend.

What’s interesting this that many agencies and media owners still cling to the idea that 3-5 exposures are required to generate “awareness and understanding” of advertising creative. They say old habits die hard and this is no exception. The 5-8 exposure rule actually has its roots in a paper written by an amateur media planner called Thomas Smith in 1885. That’s right 1885 - 125 years ago. These days we don’t ride around in trains from 1885, nor do we consume the medical potions of 1885. Come to think of it our Queen is called Elizabeth and not Victoria. So why on earth more than century later, are people still using Victorian media research to plan marketing communications?

The message of diminishing returns is simple. You cannot spend your way out of trouble but you can certainly spend your way into it. By not controlling budgets properly you can reach a point where the sales generated cannot be profitable. If you plough money into generating unprofitable sales, you’re building a business that burns money.

If you’re one of those advertisers spending most of your budget in one channel, take a close look at exactly what is returned at different levels of spend. Even super sales efficient channels like PPC are subject to the same diminishing returns rules. If you want to optimise your campaign performance try spending less. Less in each channel. Less on each day. Less on each keyword. Less on each Google ad group, Less on each creative treatment.  Smaller space sizes. Shorter commercials. You will find that less can indeed be more.

1. Dell Outlet - see one of their twitter pages here - Dell have Stephanie@Dell offering customer support on their page
   
2. Misco  - see their twitter page here - Misco have added a deal of the day to their background.
   
3. Viking Direct - see their twitter page here

I think these are great uses of Twitter. Each company can add or remove offers by the second. On the basis that “birds of a feather flock together” it’s highly likely that these offers will be re-tweeted to friends of colleagues of each first generation follower.  Links can be tracked,  sales can be measured, sales ROI can be calculated. On that topic if you go to the Dell Outlet page you can see that it has 1.5m followers which makes it the 89th most popular page globally (twitterholic). That gives Dell more followers than Paris Hilton, Stephen Fry or Sarah Brown.

To cut a long story short the Dell Outlet page offers these things: Utility, Relevance, Value.  If you can’t score more than 7/10 on each of these three measures, and you’re not a celebrity, then you will struggle to make twitter work for your business.

So why did they do it?  Television does amazing things for brands. It builds stature, it builds status, it builds employee confidence, it rocks competitors and it drives lots of traffic. More than that, TV advertising embeds brands into popular culture. It’s powerful stuff.  However, Google is already part of popular culture so why advertise on TV? My guess is they’re interested in seeing how TV ratings can be correlated to web traffic. I could have saved them around $1m here. TV ads drive web traffic at a rate of between 0.015% and 0.25%.  So with an audience of around 100m viewers, Google could have expected traffic uplifts in the US of between 15,000 and 250,000 within a few hours of transmission. What value is this to Google? When Google searchers clicks on AdWords it generates income for Google. Assume 50% of that 250,000 clicked into AdWords at a cost per click of $2, then there you have it; £250,000 of revenue. Not enough to cover the cost of the spot. But Google shouldn’t be disheartened by this  - these figures are based on buying a spot with inherently high premiums. Outside the Superbowl, the economics might look considerably better.

And for Google’s fan base (of which I am one). They are right, Google AdWords is a very powerful business generator. It collects response at the end of the sales funnel - just as the Yellow Pages did for so many years. But something has to populate that sales funnel and drive search volumes. Something has to make each brand credible; make it top of mind, the safe choice; the right choice. That’s where TV comes in.Even though things look good for Google in search at the moment, I suspect there may be changes ahead - demand for AdWords is forcing up click costs at Google and this may drive search marketing budgets to competitors like Microsoft’s Bing. As Google loses traffic it will look to fight back and it has to do that by holding and  winning back search traffic - the source of its revenue. There may well be a ferocious marketing battle to be fought amongst search providers, with Google standing to lose the most. Testing TV now, may indeed be a dress rehearsal for future TV advertising activity.

It’s interesting to note that predictions of the end of mass marketing tend to come primarily from within the non-TV marketing community. The reason for this is that those who have not been at the “business end” of TV advertising are unlikely to have made careful study of the effects of mass marketing versus the costs of undertaking it. Mass marketing can still be very powerful and it can be very cost effective. The temptation is to assume that because it costs so much, it couldn’t possibly work is erroneous. Perhaps with Google’s use of TV advertising, some of mass marketing’s critics may take time to reconsider. Google has.

Re-messaging (sometimes called retargeting) must be one of the best kept secrets of online advertising. Yes, many brands are doing it, but many more are not - and these brands are missing a major opportunity to reach historical site visitors and re-engage with them to increase sales.

What is re-Messaging?

Re-messaging enables an advertiser to re-serve online display advertising to people who have visited their website and left without purchasing or engaging in-depth (becoming a lead, registering for newsletters etc). So, imagine that you are an ecommerce retailer selling shoes. If you get a 2.5% conversion rate to sales, that means that 97.5% of your online visitors leave your site without purchasing. That’s a lot of potential customers, potentially lost forever. Well, it doesn’t have to be like that. Re-Messaging can help you bring these lost sales opportunities back into your business.

In order to run a re-messaging campaign you generally need to be working with an online advertising network. These networks gather together publishers of larger sites and do deals to sell their unsold advertising space. Nothing special there then. I agree. But here comes the interesting bit. These networks employ tracking technologoes which can detect people have been to your site and subsequently visited sites within their advertising network. It is when your past visitors visit these sites in a participating ad network that you are able to re-serve your online advertising to your past site visitors. This means you can track, follow and re-engage with people who have visited your site, but left without making a purchase.

There’s a huge creative opportunity here too. It is possible to re-message visitors who have been to specific pages within your site. Knowing which pages have been visited means you can serve custom display ads to people who have visited key pages within your site. So for example, we can identify all visitors who have been to the “Basket Completed” page, but not gone to the “Buy Now” page. These users can be served a sales reminder message such as “New Range of UGGs now in stock” or “Buy UGGS now and enjoy 5% discount until March 31st”. In this way you are able to re-incentivise past visitors who are interested in your products, but did not convert to purchase.

What kind of results can you expect from re-messaging?

In our experience click through rates in re-messaging are around five times higher than in normal online display. Conversion rates are also significantly higher because you are communicating with visitors who have already shown an interest in your site. It’s also worth mentioning that a conversion doesn’t need to be a sale; you can use re-messaging to build your database which can then form the basis of a CRM campaign. Either way, re-messaging is an extremely effective way to identify and re-connect with past visitors to your site.

Find out more about our services at www.teqtonic.com