Advertising on TV for the first time is an exciting prospect, although it can also feel a bit scary. Will the TV advert work? Won’t it? To set your mind at rest and set you up for TV advertising success, we’ve come up with five questions that first-time TV advertisers often ask – and, of course, our answers!
Should your first TV campaign focus on response?
If your brand sells direct to consumers, this answer should always be a yes. Response advertising is the way to go for most new entrants to TV advertising. Which is to say that your first TV advert should aim to drive conversions and sales, rather than pure brand awareness.
This may sound obvious, but sometimes new TV advertisers, inspired by the likes of Coca Cola and Apple, want to jump straight to the sort of super-stylish brand advert that generates long-term brand recognition, but doesn’t necessarily lead to a measurable spike in sales in the short term.
Our logic here is simple: if TV is a new advertising channel for your business, it’s important that your first TV campaign demonstrates ROI in the here and now in order to maintain the confidence of senior leaders who control budgets. No short-term ROI = no budget for future campaigns; that’s the reality we sometimes just have to live with as marketers.
Therefore, unless money really is no object, a direct response (focused purely on conversion) or brand response (50-50 conversion and awareness) campaign is a good choice for first time TV advertisers. You can read more about the difference between the two in this article.
How long should your first TV campaign run for?
We would recommend a minimum of three months, but six is quite common too. If you are planning to run your first TV advertising campaign for longer than that, you should schedule in and budget for a creative refresh at the halfway point so that your audience doesn’t become fatigued from seeing the same TV advert over and over. You may want to review your media strategy, including channel placement and frequency, at this point too.
Does the style of your TV advert matter?
By ‘style’, we mean live action footage vs animation vs a mix of both, plus the different options available within those broad umbrellas – filming on location vs in a studio, for example, or 2D vector graphics vs fully three dimensional character and set models.
The short answer is yes… and no. The creative techniques and concept used in your TV advert need to be the right ones for your brand, your campaign objectives, and your audience. However, there’s no hard and fast rule like “animated ads do better” that we can just follow blindly. It takes a collaborative effort between you and your TV production agency to come up with a creative concept for your TV ad and then put it into practice.
One thing that absolutely does make a difference to the success of your TV campaign is having high production values. Great camera work, soundtrack, edits and colouring will all make your first TV advert more likely to succeed. Which is why we have cracking directors, a highly qualified production team and a feature-film-grade production studio. Just saying.
How long should your TV advert be?
Most TV advertising campaigns are built around a core 30 second advert/script, usually supported by a couple of cut-down edits of 10, 15 or 20 seconds to fit shorter slots that may be available as part of your media package. 60 second ads are also a possibility, but as these are often more expensive to run (due to requiring longer slots) we tend not to recommend them as often to first time advertisers unless you’re working with a substantial media budget for your TV campaign.
How much do you need to budget for a TV advert?
We hate to say “it depends” but… it depends. We could write a whole article on all the variables that go into a TV advertising budget.
Don’t let that put you off though. We’ve seen brands on air with a five-figure budget, all told, but this is really one of those questions where your best bet is to speak to an agency specialising in TV advertising and get a quote tailored to your brand and your marketing goals.
Speaking of which, we’re an agency specialising in TV advertising and we’ve love to provide you a quote tailored to your brand and your marketing goals.
If you would like us to do that (with no pressure and no hard sell) drop us a message via our contact form, or info@hhour.co.uk if you prefer email.
