I love HD programming – gorgeous, beautiful, watchable. And, good for many sports because they tend to operate horizontally.

But there’s nothing about HD that makes messages more powerful for advertising. I’m sure that aficionado’s would argue with me – claim that pixel densities deliver more information, etc, etc.

What I’ve found first hand is that’s meaningless. There’s some value in layering more things on-screen — as a DRTV practitioner we can use more type more to emphasize points so details are clear. But our results weren’t suffering before and the measurable impact of these advantages is negligible – probably so small it’s not detectable.

So HD doesn’t help us make messages clearer. There is, of course, an “anti-positive”. If a high tech company (for example) chose NOT to create their ads in HD, it would speak negative volumes about them. But that’s not the same as being able to use HD to enhance messages.

The 16:9 Aspect Ratio Isn’t Great for All Products. We work with tools (hammers, wrenches, drills, …). Some are long horizontally. But many require vertical action and to be displayed vertically. When we’re dealing vertically, the 4:3 window was preferable. So the impact of HD is it forces us to dress and treat a huge chunk of screen that’s immaterial to the communication.

Probably 1/2 of products work best vertically and 1/2 work best horizontally. Almost 100% look best when you mix up a combination of framings. But, some products can do okay forced into a 16:9 window. Net out, 25% to 35% of all products are hurt by HD.

These considerations are important because HD has made advertising production much more difficult.

About 60% of the TV’s where any ad is seen are still SD. So, we have to produce for a dual format – it must look great in SD and in HD. (Easy to say, complexity to do.) Merely editing in HD slows things down. Systems had become pretty much “render wait” free. But, now HD adds back into edit days a series of 20 to 40 minute blocks of time waiting for HD renders.

Once the ad’s done, we have to deal with trafficking tapes. HD dubs and distribution are massively expensive compared with SD (about 4X to 6X the cost). And, there’s not an HD standard. Each station/network has different requirements & different equipment – especially in local markets where equipment chaos and standards are a massive headache.

So why HD? HD is absolutely gorgeous when it works – which pleases the aesthete in us all. All the best camera’s today are HD (so we never shoot anything else). Advertisers SHOULD be doing more HD. And, we don’t really have a choice – consumers are buying new TV’s, we need to make use of them.

But back to Wayne’s point, it’s understandable that advertisers are slow to adopt the format. Our reality is that HD adds chaos without adding a corresponding benefit.

Copyright 2011 – Doug Garnett

A dedicated Facebook user’s response just might be “Ads? They have ads on Facebook?”. (Yup, those clusters of 20 words or so that clutter the right hand side of the page – sometimes with microscopic images attached.)

And, that’s exactly the problem. We now learn that the clickthrough rate on Facebook ads is .051%. (Here is a summary of the study by Webtrends.) To be clear, that’s 5 one-hundredths of a percent. Or, one click through for every 2000 times your ad is displayed.

Heck, maybe this rate is pretty good since your ad is probably only noticed once out of every 1999 times it’s seen. But it is scary that this clickthrough rate is DOWN. That’s right, the click-through rate was an astronomical .063% in 2009.

And, there’s one more key concern. Facebook ads should be highly targeted – only put on pages of people whose profile indicate the ads should interest them. So your highly targeted ads have a click through rate of five-hundredths of a percent. Yikes.

A Serious Issue

A few years ago an article in Advertising Age noted that it used to be a measured fact that we’d see an average of 500 or so commercial messages in a day and remember one or two. But, we are now confronted with an average of 2500 (or more) messages a day of which…we still only remember one or two.

My analysis? New media has fragmented messages to the point where consumers don’t care about them or pay attention to them. Instead, we bombard consumers with millions of tiny attacks hoping, I suppose, to wear them down.

And that trains consumers to ignore us at higher and higher rates – like what has happened to Facebook.

Facebook’s Value Isn’t as Advertising

Internet advertising has proven extraordinarily weak at reaching out to people who aren’t already interested in your product. These numbers merely confirm what’s always been true elsewhere.

That doesn’t mean I think Facebook isn’t useful to advertisers. Instead, this indicates pretty clearly that advertising on Facebook conflicts with the reasons that we join Facebook as individuals.

At the same time, it’s all about price with this type of advertising. If you’re paying the right price for displaying your ad to 1999 people, then you’ve paid the right price for that 2000th who clicks. Maybe despite these miserable rates you can eke out a living with these Facebook ads.

But if you want your business to thrive, Facebook’s generally not the place to build it. To make big change happen, you need to leverage off-line advertising. Then once people know why they should seek you out, there’s a plethora of options for using the internet, retail, and other channels to lead consumers to purchase.

Copyright 2011 – Doug Garnett

Seems that ratings for the playoff games were at all time high’s – even getting a massively dominant 85% share in one market (Milwaukee).

I like to look at the data and see truth – not just what people have pre-disposed me to see. So, let’s ignore Bob Garfield. What do these playoff ratings mean? TV is very important and very compelling to the mass market. And, this may offer more confirmation that what consumers want is for future media is very different from what the media prognosticators want to give them. Seems that everyday folk rather like…well…um…TV.

But isn’t the internet king? Not really. Studies find that in consumer lives the internet seems to be replacing that 2nd fiddle role that radio used to play. An important role. A critical complement to TV. But without the emotionally compelling power of TV.

Consider the arrogance of the digerati. Watched the new Onion Sportsdome show on Comedy Central. For me, it was a bust. And watching, I was reminded of the fact that it’s much, much, much harder to make compelling 1/2 hour to hour long programming than to make off-color & offensive 3 minute webisodes. Besides, with programming you have to come close to hitting a home run every episode. But with webisodes, you can strike out two out of three times and if the third one is funny enough, you’ll get your web visits.

I think we’re fed a lot of internet hype by people who’ve never (a) felt the power of TV; (b) felt the power of TV advertising to move markets; or (c) had to create programming that satisfied a mass TV viewership.

So despite Garfield, I think TV continues well – though facing some major challenges of its own creation. Now we’ll have to see if the advertising and VC hype merchants will ever let us get what serves us best – or if they’ll destroy it in their lust for money and power.

Copyright 2011 – Doug Garnett

In truth, Nielsen critics should dig deeper, because there’s a more fundamental problem. No rating system, Nielsen or otherwise, can help you find the media that most cost effectively reaches an audience that will go out and buy your product.

Enter DRTV – the surprising modern media engine that drives big change more cost effectively than any other TV. How? In part, by measuring how effectively each time slot on your TV schedule reaches an audience that will take action.

Let’s Review Traditional TV Measurement. Traditional TV metrics start by giving us demographic descriptions of audiences (yawn) – and these descriptions dominate ratings. But the truth taught in advertising courses around the country (like my courses at Portland State) is that demographics are the least effective way to locate a target consumer that will take action.

This is a well known problem. So traditional media planners have developed much more sophisticated ways to describe and target audiences. They’ve been helped along this route by research firms and the networks themselves who analyze viewer psychographics, lifestyles, behaviors and geography. Traditional planners try to buy based on these criteria.

But notice what’s missing: there’s no way to know predisposition to take action.

By Contrast, Consider DRTV. In DRTV, we do some planning with traditional audience criteria. But within 2 weeks of starting a campaign, we’ve looked at phone and web results and adjusted our media buy by targeting the media that drives the most cost effective action. Later we evaluate our buy for the impact we’ve had in traditional media terms like reach & frequency, classic target market descriptors, and more detailed impact at the retail store.

For example, Atomic ran a cookware campaign where we found the most cost effective results on Lifetime Movie Network. By contrast, several “traditional planning” networks performed quite poorly – Oxygen was 250% less, Food Network 400% less and HGTV 800% less effective at reaching consumers who would take action. So after only two weeks, we removed those networks from the schedule.

The result? With a budget under $1M we drove the biggest cookware introduction at Linens-n-Things in their history. Let me say that again: we introduced a product nationally for a major retailer with under $1M in media spending and the result was the biggest cookware introduction in their history.

In fact, over a 20 year DRTV career, I’ve worked with client after client who turns to DRTV after getting minimal results from spending over $10M in traditional TV. And when they turn to DRTV, they usually drive 10 to 20 times the unit sales at retail with less than half the spending.

Why Does Predisposition to Action Matter This Much? Let’s assume we randomly select 100 people who fit your best and most in-depth target market description. How many of those are likely to be brought to action? A half? One? Two? Perhaps three? Experience shows that if 3 out of 100 people from a target market are ready to take action, you’ve got astronomical market potential.

Now remember that you are choosing how you spend millions (or even hundreds of millions) in media without knowing whether the people you reach are the same ones that will move to action. If we choose American Idol because “that’s what our target watches”, that’s also all we know. We know nothing about how cost effectively advertising on American Idol will reach people who are likely to take action.

A company with media money to burn can choose to ignore this reality. No one else should.

Use DRTV for Higher Impact from TV

If you want to cause change for your company’s fortunes – if you want to make something big and exciting happen, take a long look at DRTV.

In case after case, DRTV campaigns drive massive results at retail. These campaigns reveal that the media purchased based on traditional planning is often the LEAST cost effective. And when DRTV is effective at driving direct and retail sales, we find it is also highly effective building brands or changing brand perceptions – achieving more, faster and at lower cost than with traditional media.

Copyright 2011 – Doug Garnett

Today, DRTV’s roles for companies covers a wide range of brand and sales objectives — roles that are critical for those companies strategic success. In delivering on these objectives, direct sales or direct responses are typically critical, but they are often only one part of the total picture.

For example, when a product hits the air and is at retail simultaneously, between 7 and 20 units are sold at retail for every single unit sold directly to consumers. DRTV’s biggest profit opportunity is at retail. But many yell & sell practitioners haven’t really worked this reality into their thinking.

When you stick with the 1980′s format for DRTV (like many still do), you make driving direct sales into your sole goal. But there is clear evidence that these approaches DECREASE retail sales dramatically. In other words, pulling out all the stops to get every last possible direct sale appears to drive away more retail consumers than it gains in direct sales.

Read my latest article in Response Magazine for more thoughts about the balance of direct and retail sales – two of Atomic’s Six Degree’s for Maximum DRTV Impact. Then watch for two more articles this year to cover the remaining 4 degrees.

While you’re there, check out what Response’s Editorial Board (including yours truly) says about the last 25 years and next 25 years for DRTV.

Copyright 2011 – Doug Garnett

Right now, morning light has begun to appear for social media. Social attracted huge hype and some big corporate ad dollars with the crowd theory. This theory suggests that with so many consumers using social media it MUST be a worthwhile place to advertise.

That’s jumping a bit far, a bit fast and the crowd theory is rife with problems. Consider: If the crowd wants to talk with each other, why would they want to engage in any commercial conversation with you? Most consumer’s don’t want to be your friend.

Show Them the Money. Now we learn that consumers primarily engage with companies to get a good deal (research reported in this article from the Media Research Institute confirms other behavioral data). Note:

- Nearly 1/2 of women are primarily looking for deals through social media.
- Nearly 1/3 of men are primarily looking for deals through social media.

Uh, oh. Just as marketer’s were beginning to look forward to long soulful conversations with their consumers we find out they really only want deep discounts from us. Sigh.

The Web: Discounter’s Paradise. This isn’t bad or good. But coupon clipping with Facebook is far from the virulent & virally driven social media engagement conversations that the digerati tell us will drive the entire future of marketing (note that they can’t explain how these conversations are supposed to osmose into profit).

Social isn’t alone with coupon clipping. I just came from a Google presentation. Guess what common theme kept coming up? Using online coupons and discounts through Google, YouTube and its other properties.

All this suggests the web’s biggest advertising strength (I’m not talking about storefronts) may be the modern equivalent of Green Stamps. (History Check: In the 50′s, 60′s, & 70′s women like my mom collected Green Stamps that were awarded based on purchase behavior. Pasted into coupon books, the stamps could be redeemed for “free gifts”. There’s nothing really new under the sun – just digital ways to do it.)

New Media Hype Has Little Connection with Reality. I’ve written elsewhere about how the DVR, instead of killing TV advertising, now appears to have made it more effective. But the gap between ad biz/digerati hype and reality is a common theme in new media.

In the early 2000′s, article after article extolled the virtues of video advertising at the gas pump. We were told that Coke, Pepsi and a wealth of other traditional advertisers would thrive by capturing that lonely moment while the consumer pumps gas.

Fast forward to 2008. I live in Oregon where, by law, we can’t pump our own gas. So I experienced this advertising first-hand on a trip to LA. What did I find? Not a big brand in sight. Instead, the pump featured a brassy, loud, and continuous run of cheesy ads dominated by Phoenix University and low-ball direct response advertisers.

It Gets Worse for Social. All this helps place in context an article this morning about the current #3 Facebook advertiser. This article claims that the third largest Facebook advertiser is a scam designed to change your default search engine to Bing so that this third party gets a payment every time you search. You can read details at the above link.

Is this Facebook’s equivalent of the noisy and invasive advertising that now dominates banners online or my Los Angeles gas pump?

Let’s All Embrace the Light of Day. New media can bring important value. But it’s not found in these wild, unthinking dashes. Cooler heads must prevail and search for both the strengths and the weaknesses of each new media. Only when this happens will we finally learn how to leverage a balance of traditional and new media advertising to increase market power for our clients.

Copyright 2011 – Doug Garnett

My own experience at home confirms this. When there’s an ad that matters to someone in my family, we can now rewind to make sure we know what it says (movie release date, specifics about a product, details about the upcoming news, etc…).

And it’s beneficial to advertisers to know that they can reach, for example, Daily Show demographic that can’t watch at the typical broadcast time. That just adds to the target audience.

And so, TV remains, for the forseeable future, the fastest and strongest way to introduce new products to a large market.

For more on this topic, read this article (link here) I wrote for Response magazine summarizing the ARF research’s TV findings.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

And so, I love the business version of the holiday card tradition. That’s right. You remember physical cards. They are printed (that’s p-r-i-n-t-e-d) with a process that involves applying ink to paper. It’s a really interesting process if you haven’t ever seen it.

Even better, it creates an item that spends longer in someone’s consciousness than the average holiday Tweet (.0005 nano-seconds) or the average holiday mass eMail (.0010 micro-seconds). It fully “engages” the recipient because it’s physical. (To be clear, that means NOT displayed on a 3D TV – but something that really exists in 3 dimensions.)

Sadly, this year the holiday card is scarce. My trend-spotting hasn’t found a single reason. Some businesses seem to think they are being “green”. Some businesses may be choosing frugality in recognition of economic hard times. But a great many seem to have opted for the low-hassle/low-impact e-card.

Don’t send ME an e-card. I’ll never know you did because I delete Holiday Spam without reading. Scary thing is that online action lets us THINK we’ve done something – even though we most often haven’t as online holiday actions are forgotten at a very rapid rate.

Then, there’s donations. Over time I’ve become quite turned off by the “we’re donating” notices. Certainly the theory is based on wholesome action. Yet something still strikes a wrong note.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I have no connection to where the donations are going. Perhaps it’s the fact from many companies the notification of their donation is self-aggrandizing. Perhaps there’s an underlying suspicion that these companies only donate in order to get more business – not because they really care.

And in the strangest donation ploy I’ve seen, this year we received a donation oriented card – except the company wasn’t donating. Instead, it asked us to donate on their behalf to their specific charity. What? Is that supposed to be “authentic” or some other highly hip silliness?

Here’s the thing. The simplicity of a physical card has presence. A physical card communicates far more than an ecard. And it’s meaningful to the recipient. At an average cost of $1 to $4, it’s probably the single most cost effective way to have a brief touch with the people involved with your company. And even better, it sticks around.

So next year, when your company decides to Tweet it’s holiday greetings, perhaps you should remind them that Tweeting would be fine if customers were automatons. But there’s nothing like a physical card for communicating with individuals.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

Of course, it didn’t happen. Today, brick & mortar retail dominates purchases – and does so while using the web as one of many communication options and as a small, but important, sales channel.

What’s the hype machine telling us about advertising? The same hype machine has re-emerged and is leaping at social media, viral campaigns, and online video as the magic that will rescue the web from a minority role in advertising. (This would, of course, bring all those juicy advertising dollars to the company’s and their VC’s who are behind the hype machine.)

Once again, these broad claims are bunk. And, with beautiful irony, the theory of web dominance in advertising breaks down because of what the hype machine also tells us is the web’s biggest strength: nearly infinite segmentation.

Web users sign on, search through a small number of search engines, then scatter around the web faster than particles pushed outward from a supernova.

Web advocates have rightly noted that this makes the web ideal for targeting – claiming that online promotions can have laser-like accuracy. (This accuracy requiring, of course, various forms of passive and invasive tracking of your every online action.)

Segmentation and fragmentation are two sides of the same coin.

If all we expect of the web is a highly targeted minority role in our marketing mix, then the web has segmentation. Or if you are selling a niche B2B product to a technical audience (like IT), then the web offers segmentation – and highly valuable segmentation.

But segmentation becomes fragmentation when we consider the idea of replacing advertising’s biggest gun: television. When compared with TV, web audiences are not merely fragmented but shattered into billions and billions of tiny shards. TV’s opportunity to move millions of consumers to action simply doesn’t exist on the web.

Consider it this way. If on it’s best days TV creates a power of 100, on its best days the web creates a power of 1 to 5. As a minority share of an integrated marketing plan, this “1″ is important. But no matter how hard you try, the web’s 1 can never replace TV’s 100. (Or print’s 75; or direct mail’s 30 or radio’s 60 or outdoor’s 40 or…)

Sadly, if web advertising is all you’ve ever known, crawling around to gather enough shards to create micro-segments from nano-segments might make you think you are doing something big. (After all, it’s a lot of work and mere busy-ness can easily mask ineffectiveness.)

But if you have travelled the much wider world of traditional advertising, you’ll realize it’s impossible to use online shards in mass advertising to create anything more than a very nice minority role. (And here I should note that Apple is just one example of a savvy advertiser who knows this and relies heavily on TV while using internet advertising in a limited role.)

But heck, many web investors don’t want to hear this. And, just so, they’ll fire back. With what? Probably a Forrester research report showing an astronomical 20 year growth curve for the NEXT web invention – perhaps location based search engine optimization delivered via socially viral online video with a twitter core hosted on a cloud. Yup. That’s the ticket.

It’s time for the ad biz to grow up and confront the tech machine’s hype with advertising reality.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett

But it’s time to realize there is no hidden magic to social media. The fundamentals for estimating the value of social connections are the same fundamentals that have been used in direct marketing for over a century – lessons Claude Hopkins reveals in his writing about mail order advertising in the early 1900′s.

Consider a post I read the other day. It was published in a major national media business newsletter. And it suggested (surprise surprise) that mere viewings might not reflect any business value for online video.

Didn’t anyone learn marketing basics? Of course mere viewings don’t mean much and we know that without an intensive direct marketing background. It’s part of basic communication theory – something we teach in the “Introduction to Advertising” courses at Portland State University.

Truth is that when you have a bar that is far too low for consumer engagement, then everybody gets engaged and nobody ever gets married.

So let me suggest a new rule: Before you can call take on the title of “social media expert”, you have to take a direct marketing class. Here’s some of the lessons that would be taught in that class:

- Mere consumer action has no value. Quite often, in direct marketing, reducing the number of consumers who act will increase your net profit. I once had a campaign that drove leads at $25 each. We modified the creative so that it chased unqualified leads away. The lead cost doubled to $50 per lead, but the net revenue result was 5 times higher – that’s right FIVE times higher.

- Attracting people with entertainment often attracts thrill seekers who won’t become valuable consumers. The subscription folks have known this for decades. Heavily incentivized introductory subscription offers always generate the highest number of new subscriptions…and the lowest number of long term subscribers. So if you are attracting social connections with “cool video” (like the Old Spice campaign last summer), you’re not likely to see any business result (which is exactly the end result of Old Spice’s 2010 campaign according to the AdAge analysis).

- Marketing IS all about selling product and it pays to be honest about this. Selling doesn’t just happen – to get sales you will someday have to ask for an order. So it may feel great to start with noble intentions to use content to get engaged consumers who seek connection with your brand, but you have to sell something at some point. Worse, what consumers hear from these noble campaigns isn’t at all noble. Too often content is used as a “bait and switch” to sucker people into connecting with a brand. By contrast, direct marketing profit history suggests that if you are honest up front about your intentions, consumers respect you for it and you will generate higher revenue in the long run. (Consumers KNOW we’re in the business of selling things. So it frustrates them when we try to suggest we’re not.)

- It’s easy to raise expectations so high that your company can never meet them. Let’s learn from loyalty efforts. Programs around the world claim: “We’re your best friend forever – just tell us what you want.” But no company can deliver what this implies. So, with the exception of coupon clippers who belong to lots of programs, the average consumer has probably found at most 4 or 5 loyalty programs that deliver what they consider significant value. (For me, having joined 30 or 40 loyalty programs, only a few programs deliver any value – United MileagePlus, Delta Skymiles, Amex Rewards, Avis Preferred, and, um, uh…I don’t have any more.)

So let’s cut through the social media BS. There are already hundreds of thousands of articles, books, and reports created by hard working (and very smart) direct marketers that lay out the fundamental models for analyzing the impact of social media investment. It’s well past time for them to be applied.

Copyright 2010 – Doug Garnett