Can’t wait for things to return to ‘normal’? What the F*#* is ‘normal’? Sam Farrar (General Manager) discusses how to use “distress rates” effectively to come out of COVID-19 in front of your competitors.
It’s the phrase we are hearing every day from people everywhere but in the business sense, what is normal?
- Normally a distress rate in breakfast television wasn’t a few hundred bucks in a major city
- Normally a small to medium brand couldn’t be on a supersite billboard on a major arterial road
- Normally to produce great creative would cost a fortune
- Normally you would get a bonus spot in the highest rating program of the year
The big question when you consider all the above is whether you really want to return to normal?
The first question our Distress Rate Media team ask our partners is “was normal what you set out to achieve before COVID-19?”. Were they happy with where their businesses were at? Did they have the market share they were comfortable with? In most cases, the answer is no. Normal puts you back in the mix and back to trying to find an edge over your competitors. A normal day might be gaining a customer and losing another.
Then we look at the old argument of what percentage of the marketing pie do we allocate to direct response vs branding? Is it still 60/40? We still very much believe in the principles of direct response marketing, but has there ever been a better time to work on your brand amplification? Now is the time to run the best direct response ads of all time, yet steal back 20% of the budget while the value in the market remains at this incredible level. Effectively we have been gifted with the opportunity to take the advantages of direct marketing, all the while playing the long game for our brands.
Implementing a new strategy will let you sit back after your campaigns and start measuring your delayed response marketing and your indirect action advertising. Only then are you getting the full picture of success.
So let’s look at the new normal.
In the coming days, weeks & months advertising rates will remain very low. Normal clients are probably staying out of the market believing their direct response campaigns are useless because of circumstance. Wrong! It’s for the same reason a 100% direct response campaign leaves you so exposed in the first place. Media in 2020 allows you to do something crazy, definitely not normal, but highly effective……….. expose your brand to millions of people!
Now is not the time to wait for things to return to how they were. Don’t be normal, be smart!
