ATTENTION, PLEASE
DIRECT TALKED recently with Rob Norman about the current state of direct marketing media buying. Norman is director, interaction at Group M Worldwide in New York, the media investment management arm of WPP Group.
DIRECT: What are the biggest challenges right now in DRTV media buying for you and your clients?
NORMAN: It’s attention and audiences. The media wants to sell us audiences, which is fine. But we in the direct space want to buy prospects and the two currencies aren’t the same. The magic is using our direct response data and analytics to identify in a particular program or subset what could be the highest [possible] conversion of that audience to prospects. And we all know when we’re buying CPMs that we’re buying CPMs of programs, rather than commercial breaks.
DIRECT: How is the inventory situation?
NORMAN: It’s OK. Our clearance rates, if anything, are down year over year, which is an issue. I think the main reason is the general rise in demand in cable vs. network, and obviously vast chunks of the inventory we’d buy on a direct basis are from cable. But I wouldn’t describe it as a crisis in any sense.
DIRECT: Is the audience issue specific to television? Would you apply the same thoughts to the Web?
NORMAN: I don’t think we have a problem with audiences on the Web. We see the Web as still being dynamic and effective. We’re seeing client budgets shift [there] more and more. We haven’t had any instances this year of a client that’s put less money online than it did the year before.
DIRECT: Are you seeing clients getting more adventurous about where they put their dollars online? Blogs, for example?
NORMAN: Our clients at the moment are not massively embracing that area, mostly because they have some fear about the context in which their message [will be presented]. Our direct clients are serious, grown-up kinds of organizations, like The Wall Street Journal, Pfizer and Progressive Insurance. We have very few clients that are happy to play randomly.
DIRECT: What about podcasting?
NORMAN: It’s something that’s happening and we are doing it
