The answer to this question is a resounding yes. In my experience - and if you are running optimised TV activity - then you can expect to see web response rates to TV activity of between 0.1% and 1% (measured as site visits/TV impacts). That’s between 1,000 and 10,000 site visits per 1 million TV impacts. This is much higher than traditional phone-based DRTV where a good response rate is around 0.05%, with weaker campaigns performing at 0.005% or even less. Of course one could argue that a click is a much less committed response than a person to person phone call and this is generally reflected in a much lower online conversion rate from click to sale.
What do these web response rates this mean from a cost efficiency point of view? If you are paying a £3.00 CPM for TV impacts then 1 million TV impacts will cost £3,000. At a 0.5% site visit rate from TV, we’d see 5,000 site visits. This gives a cost per visit of £0.60 (60p) each. That’s a reasonable cost per click when compared to online sources of click traffic - especially search engines.
The challenge is to make sure that the clicks you generate from TV are high quality clicks, but this is becoming easier as TV fragments and targeting opportunities increase. So how do you optimise TV to web site activity?There are two answers to this question. One is optimising how you select and use TV channels and the other is how you manage traffic when it comes to your site. Were going to look at how you achieve these objectives in a mini series over the next few posts.
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Goodbye to Michael Grade (for now)
Michael Grade is the man who bought us the Big Breakfast, Chris Evans, Jonathan Ross, Peter Kay, Big Brother, Time Team, EastEnders, Clive Anderson, Dennis Potter’s Lipstick On Your Collar, Friends, some really cutting edge episodes of Cutting Edge plus many other land mark events in UK television such as Football Italia and the financial backing of Four Weddings. But as well as providing support for new editorial ventures, he was also commercially successful. He found the perfect balance between editorial and commercial imperatives and guided the Channel into its most commercially successful years. TV thrives on a virtuous circle of great programmes delivering strong audiences which attract good commercial revenue. Grade placed Channel Four firmly on that upward circle.
The fact that Michael Grade cannot now crack ITVs problems is not a reflection on his ability, but an indicator of the scale of ITV’s problems. TV is in stormy water. Just as the talkies took over from the silents and the small screen took over from the big screen, and just as video almost squashed cinema and as cinema underwent a resurgence, so television is now having to ride the heavy seas of change. In these circumstances it needs a strong and visionary navigator at the helm. Unfortunately, talk of Grade’s replacement inevitably includes the old “merry -go-round” of senior TV executives, but for me none of these will do. To survive, ITV must look forward not backwards to the glory days, it must find a new definition of what it stands for and it must find a new way of monetising content across multiple platforms. These issues require experience from beyond the cosy world of television. To survive, ITV must go outside TV and into the wider communications market for its next leader.
Perhaps Grade is drawing on his family’s theatrical heritage and following that old dictum of the boards; leave the stage with them wanting more. One possible error is that he may have left that bit slightly too late.