I often get emails from TV and radio advertising salespeople who tell me that they plan to use something they read on the blog — but it’s rare that anyone tells me how things turned out.
If you’ve used some of the advice you’ve read here, what happened?
What technique did you use?
Did you modify it to fit the circumstances, and if so, how?
A West Coast Toyota dealer delivered a great lesson to a TV salesperson recently. And I got to watch.
photo by puhhha/dpc
The dealer was a loyal, consistent radio user — in fact, he told us that he spent nearly $50,000 a month, every month, on radio. He’d done this for years.
He would occasionally advertise on the TV station I was working with. On those occasions, he’d average about $3-4000 a month, generally for a couple of months.
On radio, he runs local ads making a strong offer. On TV, he’d use the manufacturer’s creative — 25 seconds about the Camry with a 5-second dealer tag at the end.
I asked him: “Which works better for you — radio or TV?”
His reply: “Radio’s always worked for us. We’ve dabbled in TV, but it’s never worked as well as radio has.”
This was a needs analysis call, and I have a rule on needs analysis calls — no arguing. So I bit my tongue until the AE and I were back in the car.
He spends 50 grand a month on radio, 12 months a year, using copy that sells for his dealership.
When he “dabbles” in TV, it’s with less than 10% of his radio investment, for a couple of months at a time, using national image ads.
Of course radio works better for him!
This applies to all media choices. Over the years I’ve seen plenty of cases where the investment levels were reversed — advertisers making a genuine commitment to television and dabbling in radio. Those advertisers invariably decide that TV works better.
I’ve watched major long-time advertisers on TV or Radio Station A give Station B a small short-term “test”. Inevitably, they conclude what they “knew” all along — Station B just doesn’t work as well as Station A.
As media sellers, we get mad at these clients for not giving our medium a fair shake, but some of the blame belongs with us. Because we let them do it.
Every time we accept a small order from a big advertiser…
Every time we let them “test” our station for a month…
Every time we let them dabble when we know that they need to make a real commitment…
…we create another client who tells everyone that “I tried [name of medium here] and it didn’t work.”
Don’t let ’em dabble.
[reminder]How do you convince new clients to make a real commitment?[/reminder]
One of the most common questions a new advertiser will ask is, “How long do I need to advertise before everyone knows us?”
photo by olly/dpc
To answer, advertising people like to tell the story of the day McDonald’s decided to stop advertising.
For one day, the story goes, McDonald’s pulled everything — radio, TV, print, you name it. They’d been relentlessly marketing their products for decades, and assumed they’d could take a day off and save a few dollars.
The punch line, of course, is that store traffic count and sales dropped immediately. McDonald’s executives were so shaken by this that they resumed marketing the very next day, and haven’t stopped since.
Here’s the problem: as much as I like the story, I have no idea if it’s true, and have never been able to locate its source. If you can point me in the right direction, leave a comment below.
Because I don’t trust that story, I don’t tell it when someone asks how long they need to advertise. I tell another one.
[bctt tweet=”The day you stop advertising is the day that your customers begin to forget about you.”]
The story I tell is one I believe because I witnessed it. It happened in 2008, when I was still selling radio advertising for 1190 KEX in my hometown of Portland, Oregon.
At the time, Paramount Equity Mortgage was one of my biggest clients. They’d been running radio ads relentlessly on KEX, and many other radio stations, for three solid years. They’d been on the air every single week of the year during that time.
During that time, their creative approach never varied.
They’d used the same spokesman — Hayes Barnard — the entire time. They’d used the same jingle. There’s always been just one call to action — Barnard ended every commercial by telling listeners to “call 503-718-one thousand”.
There was solid evidence that the campaign was working extremely well (this was before the real estate crash) — the company was spending an enormous amount of money with me, and paying their bills on time. As a salesperson on commission, I paid attention to that stuff.
After three years of relentless marketing, many KEX listeners could recite the Paramount Equity phone number from memory if you woke them from a sound sleep.
But not everybody.
One day, Chris Brown, our commercial Traffic Director, received a voice mail from a KEX Radio listener. He forwarded it to me, and I was so startled that I wrote the whole message down verbatim. I’ve changed the listener’s name and number, but otherwise this is a word-for-word transcript:
Good morning Chris, my name is Bob Johnson. This morning on my drive in, approximately 5:15am on 1190, I heard a commercial… I believe it was for, Paramount Equity, it was a mortgage company advertising loans… mortgage loans. I was unable to write down the phone number and would certainly like to contact these people. I do not have a contact number. If you could get that number to me, my number is 503-555-1212. I’m very interested in the product and if it would work for me. Appreciate your help.
I called the listener back and gave him Paramount’s number: “503-718-one thousand”. We chatted for a while, and I asked him if he was a regular KEX listener. He told me he’d been listening for years, tuned in almost every day, and was a member of the Mark & Dave Cult (our afternoon show listener club at the time).
What amazed me about this is that over the past few years, he must have heard Paramount’s commercials – and phone number – hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. That phone number should have been tattooed on his brain.
And yet, the day he finally decided to refinance, he needed to be reminded one more time.
Not everyone forgets that quickly. A strong campaign will get into many consumers’ heads — Nike and Chevrolet and Budweiser have a semi-permanent place in millions of mental hard drives.
But Nike, Chevrolet and Budweiser know that “semi” always comes before “permanent”. Awareness, once achieved, must be maintained. The day you stop advertising is the day that your customers begin to forget about you.
I recently met a retailer whose television and radio commercials feature a farting penguin.
Photo by Piumadaquila/dpc
.
The ads are amusing — I laughed the first time I saw one — and when customers come into the store the penguin is a great conversation starter.
–
But many customers who laugh at the ads may not be coming in at all. Here’s where the campaign is running into trouble:
Little attention is given to the benefits the product delivers.
The store is in a remote, hard-to-find location, but the ads don’t give viewers any help in finding it.
The “Directions” link on the store’s website — a hugely important component under the circumstances — is difficult to find on the home page, and difficult to read.
There’s no way to put a hard number on it, but I am convinced that there are many potential customers who enjoy the penguins and never take the next step in the purchase process.
Marketing guru Dan Kennedy was once asked about various techniques — online and offline — that marketers use to get people to pay attention. Here’s his take:
You’ve got to put people on a track with borders on it, that keeps them from wandering off in any direction, and moves them from beginning to end to a sale. If you show ‘em a dancing bear, and the dancing bear causes them to keep moving forward along the path to a sale, then the dancing bear is a good thing… If they’re so fascinated with the dancing bear that they stop moving forward in the sales presentation just to enjoy the bear, then the bear is a bad thing.”
For an event like the Super Bowl, the case can be made that the normal rules should be suspended — it’s the one time that everyone drops their filters and pays close attention. Perhaps the water-cooler talk that a funny Super Bowl ad generates is more valuable than a coherent sales message.
Budweiser and Coke have earned a free pass with decades of relentless marketing: everyone already knows exactly what their products are and how to buy them.
Local advertising hasn’t earned that luxury. It needs to sell first and entertain later. Humor, sound effects, snazzy graphics and farting penguins are only appropriate if they help compel your customers to do business with you.
The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet. This information can be found at a website that is full of useless facts.
You know what else might be full of useless facts? Your station’s Media Kit.
PHOTO BY ILYA AKINSHIN/DPC
We tend to grab pages from the Media Kit without thinking much about the information we’re passing along. Before your next sales call, take a cold hard look at what’s in the folder. How much value is it really providing?
A few weeks ago, I was working with a television station sales department in a Midwest market. We’d had a great week of needs analysis calls, and I had finished the first drafts of all the proposals. It was up to the account executives to add the television and digital advertising plans, along with information about why their television station was the best choice for the client.
I opened a revision from salesperson, and in the “Why Our Station ” section was a page that said, “WXXX was recently chosen the Best Local TV Station by the readers of Springfield Magazine.” (Call letters and market name have been changed to protect the guilty).
I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that nobody cares what the readers of Springfield Magazine think of the TV station.
The viewers don’t care.
The employees of Springfield Magazine don’t care.
The customers weren’t going to care, either. This information was not going to move anyone any closer to spending money on the station.
And yet, there it was… in that proposal and four or five others from the same staff. It was in there because someone in the station marketing department had made that page and put in the media kit. The path of least resistance was to copy that page and paste it into the proposal.
HUGE MISTAKE
Slapping media kit pages into your presentation is the easiest thing to do, and it’s a huge mistake. Media kits are often written by somebody who’s never met your station’s clients, and has no idea what customers really want to know. Without major modification, media kit pages do not belong in your proposals.
Here are some common media kit subjects that your clients don’t care about:
· The “Award-Winning News Department.” News awards are like youth soccer trophies: everybody gets one. All of your competitors have “award winning news”, too.
· The station’s share of adults 25 to 54… when the client’s customers are all 55+.
· A pie chart showing that 56% of some survey’s respondents believe that your medium is “the most influential”.
Here’s what the clients will care about: bringing new customers to their businesses and making more money. Your clients and prospects care about themselves.
When it comes time to do an important presentation for major dollars, burn the media kit. Take the extra time to write each page from scratch — make it about your customer, not about you.
Before including any piece of information in the proposal, ask yourself: “If I were the client, would this information cause me to want to buy the plan we’re proposing?”
Be ruthless about this. If the answer is no, leave it out.
