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5 mistakes to avoid when preparing your TV campaign

24 octobre 2016 - This article was written by Augustin de Belloy, CEO of Left Productions that specializes in video campaigns for innovative B-to-C companies, and Guillaume Belmas, CEO of Realytics, leading platform that analyses and measures precisely the impact of TV campaigns.

 

Mistake n°1: Thinking that TV is inefficient

That’s wrong: pure-players are investing massively on TV and they do measure the positive impact of TV for them.

This might sound counter-intuitive – we actually wrote this article about “the End of TV advertising in 2016” a while ago – but companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix, Hungryhouse, Trivago, Secret Escape, Dayuse, Planet Photo, Meetic, etc use TV campaigns to grow their brand and accelerate their acquisition.

 

In the UK, digital companies have invested 500 million pounds in 2015 for instance (the total TV ad spending is £5 billion). Google, Facebook or Netflix spent 60% of their ad budget on TV (source here). In France, the biggest TV advertiser this summer was trivago.fr.

 

Why do those brands invest so much on TV when the internet is more efficient in terms of targeting or remarketing for instance? Because TV is the media with the biggest reach with an actual daily reach of 71% of the UK and 78% of France. The price per contact is in the end quite low.

 

However, Internet should take the lead soon and should become the 1st media in ad spendings in 2018.

 

People keep watching TV: the English watch TV for 3h37 per day, for instance, and the French, 3h44  (source : Médiamétrie).

And viewers watch TV live (3 hours for the French per day), which means they get to see more ads. In that context, an average TV campaign in the UK will generate an impressive 234 million contacts, which will then translate in a direct lift in turnover (sources here). In France, the last campaign for Trivago delivered more than a billion contact (source SNPTV).

TV advertising delivers an average return of £1.79 for every £1 spent in the UK (source here) and 1,2€ in France for every euro (source here)

And 9 campaigns out of 10 have a positive return on investment.

 

However, the younger generation is spending more time on TV and catch-up TV

The average time spent online is now three hours per day, compared with 2.1 hours watching television for kids between 7 and 16 in the UK (source here). Only a quarter of them watch TV live.

 

Mistake n°2: Avoiding A/B testing

Most advertisers create one video, broadcast it, and measure the impact of their campaign at the end, which is not reasonable! A/B testing, which is a method of comparing different versions of a same webpage for instance, is constantly used in digital, and should be used also on TV, all the more so as the media investment are often more important.

 

As far as we know, we are the only company to do A/B testing on video today in the UK and France, but everyone should do it! It is indeed possible to test the impact of several different video ads throughout your campaign. Our recent ads for Planet Photo on TF1 (the biggest French TV channel) has 3 different variations, for instance. We can then see which one works best, at what time, and we can keep on editing it and optimizing it.

 

 

 

Mistake n°3: Launching your campaign and waiting

Your campaign will bring a lot more viewers to your website, straight from the start. You can monitor them and measure precisely which slot is most efficient. With a TV tracking solution like Realytics, you can:

·      Measure precisely how many users came to your website

·      Calculate a cost per visit (the equivalent of Cost-per-Click in digital) and measure the impact of each TV spots.

·      Add a cookie on the viewers who came to your website, analyse what they do online and monitor what they buy. You can even identify their profile, understand their habits and get insights on your customers’ experience.

 

With a tracking solution, your media agency will be more transparent and will be able to show you relevant statistics to help you increase your return on investment.

Mistake n°4: Separating TV and web campaigns

More than ¾ of the viewers also use their smarphones in front of their TV, and a real surge in searches will happen right after your spot appears on TV. You can make sure to capture that audience by synchronizing your online ads with your TV ads.

 

Moreover, the incremental reach on TV is less expensive. TV will cover 75% of your target, but for every additional percentage point, it will be easier to go on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to touch those who spend less time on TV.  

 

Mistake n°5: making a “not-so-great” video to cut production costs

We’ll do some self-promotion here, but the quality of your video has a real impact on your campaign. According to Realytics, a creative ad can generate up to 50% more visit on your website per rating point and improve your conversation rate by 5 points.

 

In drive-to-web campaigns, you really need to take your audience by the hand, and have the name of your website stated by one of the actors and have it written clearly. This sounds obvious, but the truth is that not everyone does that!  

 

Regarding production costs, an average 30 second ad in France costs 280 000€ according to the French Ad Producers Association. In the US, it is $342 000 according to the American Association of Ad Agencies, but the prices vary a lot: an ad for a cleaning product will be about 100 000 euros for instance, whereas an ad for a luxury brand will often exceed 1 million euros.

 

TV ads are more expensive than Web ads because the rights for the actors, the director, the script, etc are related to the number of people who will see the ad. It’s important to bear that in mind when you prepare your budgets.

 

As for us, we create and produce our ads, and since we’re not an agency but a creative production company, we’re less expensive than most of our competitors and we can go faster (the campaign for Planet Photo was created and produced in 6 weeks) ! Don’t hesitate if you want to talk about it.

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