Direct Response (DRTV) with Brand Marketing

By Marianna Morello

With more than 30 years of experience in the print media arena, I can confess that 2009 has been a bit of a shocking year, to say the least. Rates for print media have fallen to their lowest levels in 15 years. I am buying opportunistic remnant buys at costs-per-thousand (CPM) that range from $1.25 to $8.00 for publications that would have never offered this in the past.

What does all of this add up to? A buying opportunity for anyone smart enough to get into the print media world. A number of clients have been bitten by the print media bug. They are reaping incredible returns-on-investment, with some reaching media efficiency ratios (MER) of 5.5 and better.

As we are all aware, the stock market and banks are not the places to invest your money right now. If you believe in your product, create a print ad and test the waters. Now is the time to dive in and see your profits grow. Print can give you a better ROI when you consider all the alternatives.

The DRTV industry has always felt that print ads do not pay out. On the contrary, during the economic crisis, print media is the cheapest way to invest money into your product or service, with as little as $3,000-5,000 enough to test a newly developed print campaign.

Remember one thing: you can always use another revenue stream, and print is a stream that keeps on flowing. Even after your short-form campaign or infomercial is off the air, your print ad will keep on returning responses for weeks and months to come.

Need more reasons to try print media? Here are nine reasons (courtesy of Magazine Publishers Association studies from 2007 and 2008) to give it a shot.- READ THE ARTICLE: Why Print Media — and Why Now?

By Rick Petry

As a marketer new to direct marketing, you may wonder how to best evaluate and select a terrific media planning and buying agency. The following is intended to give the reader a few things to consider and qualities to look for when looking for an agency partner.

Size Matters
One of the issues frequently debated is the size of an agency – is it large? Does it have enough clout? And while certainly you want assurances that the agency has sufficient resources to do right by your campaign, there are pros and cons to be weighed between Madison Avenue buying behemoths and a shop that is more of a boutique.

For example, if you’re a fledgling business just starting out, you’re not likely to have a huge budget. It is easy to get lost in the shuffle amid a large agency that is doing hundreds of millions of dollars in billings and may be under financial pressure to focus on established, big budget accounts. Direct marketing is about testing and retesting, and a giant agency may not have the patience or desire to nurture a smaller player. On the other hand, a small- to mid-sized boutique may be hungry and more inclined to invest the time necessary to build a client from a few thousand dollars in media per week to hundreds of thousands over time. - READ FULL DIRECT RESPONSE ARTICLE: How to Select a Great Short Form DR Media Agency

By Scott Richards

If you’re a direct marketer then you know how tough it is to get a consumer to raise their hand by calling in to an inbound call center, especially in this economic environment. Among the many challenges that marketers face is the fact that within the direct marketing industry and the call centers that they rely on, there is no clear definition for the various broad categories of call types. These general categories include calls that were:

* Answered
* Short
* Incomplete
* No Answer
* Busy

Within these broad categories, there are sub-categories of various call dispositions. These include:

* Caller Hung Up Before Connecting
* No One On Line
* Prank or Obscene Call
* Wrong Number
* Test Call
* Computerized Autodialer
* Customer Service
* Hung-Up Mid-Script
* Misunderstood Offer
* Doesn’t Have A Check/Credit Card Info Ready
* Question About Payment
* Question About Product
* Will Call Back
* Order Calls
- READ FULL DIRECT RESPONSE ARTICLE: Control Your Telemarketing Data To Control Your Fate

A Sony Pictures Entertainment company, 2waytraffic knows television audiences and how to produce compelling content that puts viewers in active mode. Two years ago, 2waytraffic’s EVP of Business Development, James Joyce, created a unique platform that fuses participation TV in programming with telco-based DRTV offers. Viewers are invited by the host, judge or other talent from a popular national TV show to call a toll-free number and vote or give their opinion on show topics. After participating, callers are presented with several direct response offers, which are fulfilled by a live call center agent or transcription database capture.

2waytraffic has successfully integrated this experience into more than a dozen nationally syndicated and network programs, including Maury, Judge Joe Brown, The View, Inside Edition and The Biggest Loser, among many others, offering advertisers a unique opportunity to instantly convert these valuable audiences into customers in a completely measurable way. 2waytraffic inserts advertisers into these programs on a Cost Per Lead basis, making their platform completely unique in the marketplace. Now, advertisers can run per inquiry-based campaigns on nationally broadcast programs in some of the most sought after programs on television, where per inquiry media placements have never been available to them.
- Converting Viewers Into Customers: 2waytraffic gets TV viewers to call

By Scott Richards

One of the oldest and most effective forms of direct response marketing has been the “per inquiry” (PI) model of advertising. PI advertising has been around decades before Google popularized the model online. Simply put, with PI advertising, the advertiser pays only for qualified responses. What constitutes a “qualified response” has always been the tricky part.

While technology has changed, the core model of PI advertising has not. Therein lies the problem. The success of Google’s online advertising platform can be attributed, in part, to its tool, which brought a degree of transparency to the process. - Putting the Trust Back in Per Inquiry Advertising

By Shari Altman

It’s always a topic of conversation among DR marketers – What’s “hot”? But what is “hot” today may be a bad bet in terms of profits and sales. The so-called “flash in the pan” like the “pet rock” of yesteryear is not a trend to follow. There was only one “Pet Rock”.

So let’s take a look instead at what trends are popular, with an eye towards those that have longevity and thus opportunity for sales and profits not just today, but over the years to come. The key – long-lived marketing trends are always based on real societal changes. Offer and Product Trends in DR - Fall 2008