MEDIA BUYING DIRECT RESPONSE TELEVISION (DRTV) ARTICLE ..

 

Holding On, Buying Time

By: Bridget McCrea
Published: 10/06 - Response

 

Times have been tough for DRTV media buyers in 2006, a year that has seen mortgage interest rates climb, gasoline costs soar and consumer sentiment wane after a multi-year boom in home-buying and consumer confidence. Despite record results in Response's quarterly long-form media billings research, industry insiders say the second quarter hit particularly hard, leaving media buyers to go back to the drawing board to figure out how to obtain both long- and short-form avails at the best possible price.
 
"Everything went into the sewer in April," says Barry Jacobs, executive vice president of E & M Impart Advertising in Los Angeles. He credits the high gas prices for essentially "shrinking" the buying public's discretionary dollars, and says that led to low demand for high-priced items.
 
"When we put the $200 or $300 price points on infomercials, we're just not getting the activity," says Jacobs. "Instead, we're using more $39.95 trial period offers that allow consumers to either continue the payments from there or return the product."
 
But even the best offers in the world didn't help buyers gain leverage in a crowded media market. "If we call reps up and tell them that the media time is too expensive, they tell us that there's a line of other people waiting for it," says Jacobs, who points out that results aren't high enough to justify the rising media costs brought on by increased demand.
 
"It's getting very difficult to make shows work on a consistent basis," he explains. "We're having to pass on some deals with networks that were historically our 'bread-and-butter' networks, or not deal with large packages because it's all borderline right now, in terms of results."
 
The decline in results has been significant, according to Peter Koeppel, president at Dallas-based Koeppel Direct, who says media buyers were buzzing about a 25-percent drop during the third quarter. As cooler weather kicks in and the new fall TV lineup starts to grab viewers he says those results may return to some level of normalcy.
 
"TV viewing should creep back up, and that affects both long- and short-form performance," says Koeppel. "As we go into the fourth quarter, I expect stations to ask for higher prices (as usual), but depending on performance, some of those prices may come down."
 
Darts Against the Board
 
For DRTV media buyers, there's no relief in sight, at least from Jacobs' perspective. The fact that media time is tight, prices are high and results are less than desirable has pushed this media buyer to switch to the kind of media plans that he used back in the early 1990s: buy more broadcast than cable, since the former is more negotiable.
 
"While it's tougher to make broadcast work, we're taking our network orders and doing market purges and buying those markets that index over 100," says Jacobs. "We're trying to pick the markets using some kind of logic, instead of just throwing darts against the board."
 
Rob Medved, president at Cannella Response Television Inc. in Burlington, Wis., credits an increasingly fragmented channel lineup and notable news events with creating a "very inconsistent viewing audience," this year. He says short-form DRTV media on larger networks has been very difficult to obtain, which is not very different from last year.
 
"Healthy scatter and hybrid DRTV advertisers do not allow for much remnant inventory," says Medved. "At the same time, the rise in the price of gas and a slowing of the housing market run have also curbed the response pocketbook."
 
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