It's a fact of life: TV ads, like all other types of advertising, eventually fatigue. Some maintain a consistent response rate for 5 years, while others start to lose their impact after just one month. Region and demographic are obvious factors, but frequency is by far the most important determiner of how quickly TV ads lose their appeal. TV ads that are aired more frequently lose their effect faster, while those that are played less often stay fresh for longer.
You test, continuously. You test the response rate of both your currently running commercials and your new TV ads. When your new creative outperforms your current TV ad, then you need to consider replacing your current commercial. But that begs another question: should you refresh TV advertising as soon as it starts to wane? No, not without doing some number crunching first.
The production and testing of new television advertising should only amount to 10% of your advertising budget, which means that your slots themselves are by far the greatest expense. It then makes sense that you'd want to fill those slots with the best performing creative to get the most from your largest expense. However, replacing your television advertising as soon as it starts to wane may not make sense if its response rate is only dropping slowly and gradually. You need to determine at what point the cost of a new commercial justifies the improvement in response rate.
There is another reason that you might want to allow an advertisement to mature: good ideas don't grow on trees. Your creative team is only capable of coming up with so many fresh ideas for a single campaign, and you need to give their best work the airtime that it deserves. Memorable TV ads will continue to build brand awareness even when the response rate starts to taper off. Delaying the replacement of such winners will also help keep TV advertising costs down.
Get help from an expert
Knowing when to refresh a TV ad is key to ensuring maximum ROI but it takes much judgement and experience. For this reason, it would be wise to hire an experienced television advertising agency to produce and manage your creative for you. But you need to find an advertising agency with the right priorities. Be wary of advertising agencies that pitch a single 'big idea'. These agencies often only want to realise their dream of winning an award. In our experience, awards don't deliver results; optimised television advertising does.
If you are interested in growing your business through DRTV advertising, we can show you how TV can deliver real ROI. As experts in optimised television advertising, we help our clients realise their potential by getting to the heart of what their customer are about. We don't chase awards and we don't persist with what doesn't work. We test and optimise, always looking for ways to improve response rates while boosting ROI. See for yourself by trying out our free TV performance analysis.
If you're open to discovering how Direct Response TV (DRTV) secrets, from our leading Melbourne advertising agency, can drastically improve your lead generation and ROI from TV advertising, please download our FREE e-book now.
Image credit: Fresh Signs
