How we’re bringing Direct Response back from the dead.
Back in the 90s, Direct Response was King. Clients of all shapes and sizes were delighted with the measurable results they could achieve, simply by saving their customer’s records on a spreadsheet, or in a data warehouse, and using that data to send them all sorts of cool things in the mail. They could also connect the dots with TV and radio response via phone numbers, codes on print coupons and, for the first time… email!
Mail, however, was the most effective by far, because it was the most creative. (How do I know this? Because I judged a whole bunch of Direct Marketing award shows and also won response awards around the world). Dimensional Mail, in particular, pulled huge numbers — it cost a bomb to make, but it stood out like the proverbial dog’s dinkus and, because it was often perceived as ‘too good to throw away’, it sat around in the physical space reminding people about your brand and what you stood for. (You don’t see that happen in the digital space, do you?)
Little by little the cost-effectiveness of email prevailed, as advertisers settled for lower response rates as a trade-off for lower production costs and lower perceived risk. The first banner ad appeared in 1994, for AT&T, and pulled an amazing 44% response. Very soon after, banners were achieving around 2% average response rate, dropping to 0.5% by the early 2000s and now, less than 0.1%. (If any of my campaigns had performed this poorly in 1995, I would have been moved on.) Ad blocking has since added to the challenge, and programmatic buying has not really lifted response rates to any noticeable degree.
What now? TAO.
TAO. Test. Analyse. Optimise. TAO is a new approach developed by our group’s Chief Creative Officer at Rumble Singapore, Andy Greenaway, and his team, with enthusiastic support from Edison and Rumble in Australia. I was lucky enough to work with Andy in three different incarnations — Ogilvy & Mather Direct in the 90s, digital behemoth Sapient Nitro in the 2010s and now at Rumbletown — so we share a deep appreciation of Direct Response techniques and the creative side of bringing that to life.
What Andy has done is so blindingly simple. Applying Direct Response principles to AI-assisted, hyper-targeted messaging. Doesn’t sound simple, does it? But, if you spent a good chunk of your life applying creativity to data-driven channels, you get it in an instant.
TAO uses a media platform that has a relationship with98% of the world’s online publishers, that brings together media behaviours, narratives from social listening and strategic planning tools that sit on top of the programmatic buying process. It can define categories and audiences, scan the web to see exactly what people are consuming, target those people with contextual display ads and retarget them in social channels. By testing and optimising creative messages within this framework, TAO has been delivering phenomenal results for clients in Singapore — 200%, 300% and even 400% better results than the baseline. A small car campaign, using only existing visual assets already produced by the client, achieved over $66 ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend), with over 14% response rates on Meta. This is unheard of in our industry, until now.
TAO is proving that long copy can work more effectively on social media, despite what the platforms spruik as ‘best practice’, because it is being TESTED, ANALYSED and OPTIMISED.
Edison is looking forward to unleashing the power of TAO in the Australian market. SO, if you want to see a few case studies that demonstrate the irrefutable value of TAO, drop us a line. You can expect a very Direct Response.
Michael Kennedy, Creative Director, EDISON
