Most of our readers grew up in an era where marketing was a one-way form of communication. The idea was to broadcast a television commercial to millions of viewers and shout loudly enough that they stopped what they were doing and took notice of your ad.

In 1965, you could run 1 commercial during prime time and reach 85% of the viewing audience. Today, it would take more than 125 commercials to accomplish the same thing. Despite this, there are ways to use TV to efficiently drive sales, if you know what you're doing.

The consumer behavior model this technique followed was called AIDA. It was developed in the 1960s and it stood for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

The idea was that if your television commercial stood out and got enough attention then that would drive a certain percentage of the people to have interest. Of those, a certain percentage would have desire and a subset of that group would eventually take action.

The good news was that, back in the 1960s, you could run 1 television commercial during prime time on 3 different channels and reach 85% of the viewing audience. (For perspective on this, today, you’d have to run the commercial more than 125 times to reach 85% of the viewing audience.)

Despite television’s ability to reach massive numbers of people, it was still a highly-inefficient form of communication. For example, let’s say you were advertising something that was targeted just to men — men’s shoes. Automatically, right out of the gate, 50% of the people watching your commercial weren’t interested in what you were selling. So before you even sold a single shoe, 50% of your marketing efforts were wasted.

But wait, it gets even worse. Of the 50% of the people who might be viable candidates for your shoes, you could imagine that half of those were either in the bathroom taking a pee or in the fridge looking for that last cold beer.

So now, only 25% of the people watching your commercial are actually watching your commercial. That’s 75% inefficiency!

And it gets worse still!

Of the 25% who are actually sitting in front of the boob tube, maybe half of those just bought new shoes in the past 4 months. So now, only 12.5% of the people are actually active candidates for your shoes.

And of those 12.5%, maybe half of those don’t like your brand of shoe!

So suddenly, you realize that you paid for 100% of the viewing audience, but only 6.25% are actually watching your commercial and might be interested in buying your shoes.

What a horrible, horrible waste of money.

Oddly enough, for more than 50 years, this model worked. How? Because marketers built those kind of inefficiencies into their ROI models and everything came out in the wash.

But those days are over. Kaput. Gone.

How many of you reading this post could go into your CFO and say that 93.5% of your advertising budget was going to be wasted on inefficiencies and mis-targeted ads? If you tried that, you’d probably lose your job.

The good news in all this is that there is hope. There are plenty of ways you, as a marketer, can gain efficiencies with your marketing. Better still, TV isn’t a complete waste of time. In fact, if you read this article on the 60 Second Marketer site about how to use television to efficiently generate sales, you’ll find plenty of good ideas and advice on getting the most bang out of your television buck.

The Bottom Line:

The days of being able to run a television commercial and watch the cash register ring are over, unless you know some of the new ways to gain efficiency with television advertising. In the meantime, you can focus on other marketing tools like paid search, SEO, Email marketing, direct response marketing and social media to drive sales and revenue.

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Posted by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer, the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine for BKV Digital and Direct Response.

Saturday, June 12th, 2010, 2:06 pm   |   General Marketing  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback