By Kevin Svenningsen, SVP, Media Tracking Services and NTS Client Service, Nielsen, and James Vanek, Account Executive, Tracking Services, Nielsen
The world moves pretty fast. In the world of direct response (DR) advertising, it moves even faster. In fact, the faster, the better. That’s because making real-time decisions means making money. Today, the advertising world produces more than three million DR ad spots each year—an increase of roughly 20 percent since 2007. At a pace like that, there’s no shortage of opportunities.
Given the real-time nature of DR advertising, agencies and advertisers need to know if, when and where their spots air as quickly as possible. Historically, this has been somewhat of a dilemma because media buyers had to wait weeks or months for TV and radio stations to post their ad logs.
This is, however, the digital age, and log-posting technology has gone paperless. Thanks to electronic verification—a TV industry standard that encodes spots with tracking information before they are distributed—media buyers can access the information they need instantly online. Nielsen also provides ratings and impressions with detections for branding advertisers using the DRTV model.
Combining verification with performance metrics enables DR agencies to make adjustments during a campaign that will maximize return on investment, reduce workload and save money.
Download this recent report by Acquirgy here to understand the basics on DRTV and DR-Radio tracking.
Methodology
Nielsen provides complete coverage for all 210 local TV markets, 140 radio markets, more than 160 cable networks and 50 markets of local spot cable, as well as a daily report that shows exactly when and where encoded spots aired. Nielsen’s Web-based agency and advertiser tool combines verification data, buy schedules, buy guidelines and daily gross rating points (GRP) delivery full campaign monitoring.
