Use BRTV to Maximise Online Sales

CLAIREABELLA – CARRY YOURSELF WITH STYLE

DRTV (Direct Response TV) is often seen as the poor relation of traditional high budget Brand advertising but in the past decade the increased use of online retail has narrowed the gap. This has led to the creation of a low cost TV advertising called BRTV (Brand Response TV).

Increasingly we are making 30sec TV spots to encourage viewers to use their smartphones to visit a website and make a purchase. With BRTV the focus is less on brand name recall and more about driving online traffic.

This style of TV ad qualifies as “direct response” and allows ARM Direct to plan & book TV airtime that costs nearly 50% less – these rate savings help make TV advertising affordable for start-ups to test TV.

BRTV delivers a more effective viewer engagement via the advertisers website and the airtime rate discount minimizes risk and allows first time advertisers to safely test TV.

Our experience is that BRTV can generate over 45% more online responses within 10 minutes of a well made BRTV 30sec spot being transmitted.

Nielsen Research tells us that some 60% of TV viewers watch the box and surf the Internet simultaneously and we find that the multitasking 18-35yr age group react positively to BRTV ads – especially if these are highly creative and slightly quirky – similar to what they like to watch on YouTube.

Younger viewers like to immediately visit a BRTV advertiser’s website and just as importantly share what they’ve found with their friends on Facebook & Twitter & Instagram & Snapchat. Results are even more powerful when the BRTV ad offers a free sample or special discount.

We’re on a mission to make BRTV more affordable and one recent success has been to help a dynamic online company to significantly grow sales of their hero brand.

Founder, Claire Barratt, took to social media to sell her unique customised ClaireaBella bags and Chloe Simms from the hit TV show – The Only Way is Essex – bought one and was “papped” with the photo appearing prominently in a national newspaper. Claire says of that time, “I was bowled over with the immediate response online! A few days later Chloe was also spotted in series 2 of the TV show with her bag and my Twitter timeline went crazy!”

Later that year Claire got in touch with an online gift website called ToxicFox.co.uk and they were soon collaborating and extending the range further.

Clinton Njie (CEO of ToxicFox) decided to explore whether television advertising was an affordable option and he appointed ARM Direct to make a low-cost stylish 30sec BRTV creative using the catch phrase “carry yourself with style”, featuring 3 young models and fun character animations by Nick Sneath.

For a fixed media budget this was tested on selected UK TV channels and ToxicFox website sales increased significantly with ClaireaBella fast becoming a “must have” bag in the all-important pre-Christmas online sales period. This initial test proved so successful that ToxicFox made further BRTV ads to support their brand on a wider mix of TV channels.

Research ‘TV and Online: better together’ conducted by Thinkbox & IAB, confirms that TV advertising can drive people online in a host of different ways, the benefit being that the smartphone consumer journey is now much shorter and viewers often respond to TV ads as and when they are seen in real time. From their analysis it became apparent that the role of TV in driving online response has been undervalued. Partially, this is due to the huge increase in smartphone ownership.

BRTV campaigns are based on hard facts as the response + sales numbers don’t lie – meaning that results can always be improved month-on-month by cutting out the slow performing TV channels and testing new ones.

Television’s impact on website response + sales all too often slips under the radar but the reality is this:

Making a low-cost highly creative BRTV ad helps drive significant online traffic especially as all BRTV ads shown on TV + social media channels can now instantly be searched, shared and copied adding a whole new dimension to agency accountability.