Electronic Retailer - April 2011 - 47

market, tailoring their campaigns both for national Spanish-language networks such as Telemundo and for local broadcast stations in many areas. This has added up to 20 percent in incremental revenue for some clients, he says. “That’s not by taking anything away from their existing sales. I mean entirely new business.”

How They Pay
Fragmentation of another sort has occurred on the payment side, creating new challenges for measuring the success of a DRTV campaign. “Five or six years ago, maybe 5 percent of all DRTV orders came in via the internet,” says Nancy Lazkani, president and CEO of Icon Media Direct of Van Nuys, Calif. “Today it isn’t unusual for 40 to 80 percent of TV respondents to go to the web to buy.” The secret to measuring the value and impact of a DRTV ad buy always had to do with “a particular 800 number tied to a particular show on a particular network at a particular time of day,” Lazkani says. “If

“Five or six years ago, maybe 5 percent of all DRTV orders came in via the internet. Today it isn’t unusual for 40 to 80 percent of TV respondents to go to the web to buy.”
– Nancy Lazkani, Icon Media Direct

I ran on [networks] USA and Discovery in the same half hour, I knew which program elicited the best results because they had different 800 numbers.” Today, a viewer who sees Lazkani’s ad during an afternoon program might wait until evening to go to a website to buy it. This is especially likely if the ad runs on a program or a network aimed at younger viewers – MTV, say, as opposed to Hallmark or Lifetime. To further complicate things, the viewer might have used a DVR to record the program that carried her ad. In that case, the viewer might see the ad a week after it ran, and then go to the web to buy the product. It is possible, of course, to assign different URLs to different commercials. But for a number of logistical and marketing reasons, this quickly becomes problematic, Lazkani says. The upshot is that agencies “need new technology and new methodologies to track how their TV ads did.” Agencies all mention this as an ongoing technological challenge. “We have new

Did you know that TV drives consumers to search more than any other medium?

rollout into retail, that means you need a bigger war chest to play the game – more up-front capital to pay for inventory.” Agencies are adjusting to the new dynamics in different ways. Yallen says that InterMedia is working with more “Fortune 500-type” clients that use DRTV primarily for lead generation rather than for immediate sales. Barnes says that Mercury is taking more of its DR clients into the U.S. Hispanic TV

Yet very few marketers integrate their TV and online campaigns to maximize conversion. At Koeppel Direct we are experts at coordinating TV and online advertising to achieve the optimal ROI.

To learn more: Call 972.732.6110 or visit www.koeppeldirect.com

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April 2011 | electronicRETAILER

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Electronic Retailer - April 2011

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