a brand campaign is delivering its total
impact in DRTV. They’ve been quite
helpful in making clear the potential of
DRTV as a brand advertiser medium.
Savage: We service a lot of traditional
marketers, and we have found that the
best way to help them succeed is to listen
to them and understand what they want
to achieve, and then to educate them on
how DR can be effective for them based
on their objectives. Traditional marketers
will often need high touch on business
modeling, back-end operations, as well as
upfront education on the different ways
to measure success, so that their objectives are realistic.
Does today’s consumer respond
better to short-form or long-form
DRTV? Which of these two formats
are best supported by other media,
including online, mobile, print and
radio?
Eden: The product configuration of a
long-form offer and a short-form offer
are different enough that price point is
the ultimate determinate of success by
length. The credit-worthiness situation
has made installment billing higher risk,
therefore forcing higher priced products
to remain in the long-form arena. Traditionally, ancillary media have been most
effective when integrated with a short-form campaign.
Knight: It all depends on your targeted
consumer. Historically, long form has
done very well, as it enables the consumer
with enough information about a certain
product to make a well-informed buying
decision. Short form, on the other hand,
is more applicable to the new media platforms available today and highly digested
by compulsive, on-the-go consumers.
Lee: It all depends on the marketing vertical. Some campaigns use short form to
brand and push eyeballs to the Internet.
Others use short form as a way to sell
free trial offers. A product still has to be
highly demonstrable and have a story to
tell to use long form.
Sarnow: Feasibility analysis is still the
key to determining whether short-form
or long-form DR is the best path for a
marketer and their product introduction.
Consumers can’t be expected to purchase
a product that costs $100 if the message
is complex and the marketer tries to introduce the product in a two-minute spot.
When a short-form or long-form campaign is successful, you see a bump in just
about every other sales outlet including
radio, print, keyword, pay-per-click, etc.
How has the continuous weakening
of the dollar affected U.S.
marketers’ abilities to buy and
manufacture products overseas at
