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November 28, 2006

Why Your Direct Response Radio Advertising Campaign Might Still Fail

Joe Rashbaum's article in DM News, titled "Why your direct response radio campaign might have failed", provides some valuable thoughts on maximizing the success of direct response radio advertising campaigns.

In his first point, Joe underscores something we continually address in the direct response radio creative process: people don't want details in the ad, they want benefits. Benefits drive response in radio. Details don't. Often the difference between feature and benefit can be nuanced, so this it's not as simple as saying "just focus on the benefits" in the radio ad.

Joe's point about selecting the correct call center for direct response radio is a huge one. In our article titled The Five Biggest Mistakes in Direct Response Radio, we touch on this issue. Calls that are driven from direct response radio ads can yield very profitable results, but only if the call center is trained in the proper approach.

It is in Joe's third point that I have a few areas of disagreement. The first is that, while frequency is important in radio advertising, two weeks of testing aren't required to find out if the ad being tested is going to be profitable in direct response radio. With the correct scheduling approach, you'll know by Thursday if the radio ad is going to work. There is no point to continue a radio advertising test for more than a week if the customer response is not evident by Thursday. The best move at that point is to pause, analyze the data, and revise the radio creative and other variables according to what was learned from the test.

My second point of disagreement is that you have to test in top 30 markets to get good direct response radio test data. As a blanket rule, we haven't found this to be true at all. We leverage our enormous database of radio stations and corresponding reports to enable us to use a larger number of smaller stations for testing. This gives us, for a given budget, a larger sample size of stations within a given format, thereby reducing the chance that we incorrectly deem an ad either a success or a failure based on unreliable results data. One large under- or over-performing station can skew test results significantly. Without smaller stations, a huge test budget would be required. The ability to leverage database analysis to make a moderate test budget count by yielding as much valuable data as possible is a huge benefit to campaign success rates. It minimizes up-front investment and gets a campaign to positive cash flow much more quickly.

It's true that in direct response radio there are is more than one way to go about doing things. What makes this a great industry is that people like us here at Strategic Media and Joe are out there evolving and improving a unique approach to direct response radio. We're not all doing things the same way, and it is always great to trade perspectives.

Posted by Jeff Small at 02:38 PM | Permalink