Dental Marketing Mediums: Television

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Dental Marketing Mediums Television
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• Part two of our blog series on high-risk
  marketing mediums covers television. Similar to
  what we discussed during the first blog posting
  of this series, television is one of the first
  marketing mediums most dentists want to try.
  However, before trying this mass medium, you will
  want to do your best to determine if it will
  deliver the kind of results that justify the high
  price tag. Are dental TV ads really the right way
  to go for your practice?

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• Television a big-ticket medium with sizable
  potentialThere is no medium in the history of
  western civilization that has had more of an
  impact on buying decisions than television. Most
  of us can still remember television commercials
  from our childhood. Maybe it was Clara Peller
  asking us Wheres the Beef?, or Bartles and
  Jaymes standing out in their field, or even Mr.

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• Whipple asking us not to squeeze the Charmin.
  Even if we havent seen these commercials in over
  20 years, most of us can still picture them in
  our minds eye, and whether we buy the companys
  product or not, we maintain a strong sense of
  familiarity with it.

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• Given the power that television commercials
  continue to have over us, its no surprise that
  many of us want to harness that power and get it
  working for our businesses. And for many
  businesses, a good TV commercial can have a
  tremendous impact on brand recognition and,
  ultimately, sales. However, its not a medium for
  the faint of heart or light of wallet. Purchasing
  airtime for a dental TV ad campaign can be an
  expensive proposition. And before you start
  shelling out for airtime, you may be looking at
  an even bigger expense the development of the ad.

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• As with radio, we counsel our clients to
  establish themselves in other mediums first, such
  as online marketing, direct mail and print,
  before considering a television ad campaign. In
  most cases, you just wont see good returns on
  television advertising unless you have a robust,
  well-established marketing plan that has been in
  place for a few years. In terms of deployment
  progression, television is the marketing medium
  you will break into LASTafter online marketing,
  after direct mail and after various forms of
  print media.

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• The reality is that in most US markets, the
  over-the-air television ad rates (for instance,
  those of your local ABC, NBC and CBS affiliates)
  are likely to be far beyond your available
  budget. But cable television IS a viable
  promotion medium for a dentist.

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• If you are ready to invest in a dental TV ad
  campaign, youll need to put some careful thought
  into the creative content for the ad. Without a
  clear, compelling message and a memorable
  creative concept, your ad is likely to be lost in
  the general noise that people can now easily
  silence with a click of the remote.

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• So, what do you need to develop a strong
  creative concept and a great and memorable ad? A
  lot. To begin with, you need a concept capable of
  communicating the essence of what you do and why
  someone should care in 30 seconds or less. That
  alone is a spectacular challenge. Now, maybe
  youre the Steven Spielberg of dentistry, but you
  may want to leave the development of a creative
  concept to a professional ad agency. Then youll
  need to flesh out the concept with a good script,
  hire actors or a professional voice-over actor
  and find a competent audio and video company to
  shoot and edit the spot.

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• When larger companies consider television
  advertising, the creative work and production is
  usually far less expensive than the airtime that
  they will be purchasing. However, most dental
  practices will not have a big budget, and
  deploying a large amount on production and
  creative could result in the campaign not even
  getting off the ground.

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• You could save some money by writing the script
  yourself, and getting your local cable company to
  come out and do the shoot for you inexpensively,
  but the results are often amateurish and
  ineffective. Thats not to say it isnt possible
  to shoot a good commercial this way, but you need
  a strong, memorable concept, professionally
  executed, to help you break through the clutter
  on TV and leave an impression in viewers minds.
  If your creative stinks, it doesnt matter how
  many TV spots you buy, youre just going to be
  throwing money away.

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• Thats not to say that a television ad is always
  a bad ideasome dental practices have seen
  tremendous returns from their television
  advertising campaigns. But you need to go into
  this type of marketing with your eyes wide open,
  both in terms of the costs involved and in terms
  of the returns you expect to see.
• Here are some key considerations when creating a
  television ad and making an ad buy

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• Television footprint Make sure your ads will
  be seen throughout your core geographic market,
  and with cable television, watch for what is
  called market fragmentation. An example of market
  fragmentation might be when two large cable
  companies each service your core market. In this
  case, you would have to make two media buys with
  two different cable companies.

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• In order to afford both buys, you would need
  to purchase half the volume on each station,
  which dilutes your frequency. You would also be
  paying a higher rate for each buy, because youre
  purchasing smaller amounts from each vendor. Even
  worse, you will probably be buying broadcast
  coverage that extends beyond your target area,
  which means youre wasting a portion of your ad
  budget on reaching people who wont use your
  services.

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• Television programming As with radio, you will
  want to focus on getting airtime on channels that
  cater to a female demographic aged 25 years and
  above. In this regard, television is much simpler
  than radio. It is easy to tell the cable
  advertising rep, We want our ads to run on
  LifeTime, Soap Channel, the History Channel, the
  Discovery Channel, and HGTV.

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• Television scripting When you promote on
  cable TV, the TV production crew will generally
  come out to your practice, do an interview with
  you and perhaps film a patient testimonial or
  two. These crews are knowledgeable professionals,
  but they can still make a few mistakes

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• Make sure they dont film an operatory, as
  dental chairs in an operatory actually evoke a
  fear response in many dental consumers. There is
  nothing to gain and everything to lose if you
  show a dental operatory. If you have a lovely
  practice and a warm, inviting reception area,
  restrict the filming to those areas, or shoot the
  ad off-location in some attractive, neutral space.

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• As with radio, you wont have enough time to
  tell the whole story of the practice. Choose
  instead to showcase a limited number of benefits
  perhaps two or three. Focus on the aspects of
  your practice that your target audience would be
  most interested in and those that differentiate
  you from other dentists. If you welcome families
  with kids, youll want to say that.

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• If a benefit of your practice is that you do
  everything under one roof so the patients wont
  have to be referred out, then say that. Maybe
  youre open on Saturdaythats a huge benefit for
  a working family. So, in this example youve got
  three benefits to promote. Dont try to do much
  more than that. A very workable approach is to
  shoot multiple advertisements that each highlight
  two or three different services or benefits. Then
  you rotate the spots just like you do with radio.

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• Why your tight budget might stretch to a
  television ad campaign
• Its getting harder and harder to put together
  an effective ad campaign on the
  televisionbecause theres more and more of it!
  Notice how the channels just keep proliferating
  and fragmenting? Well, the audience is
  fragmenting, too, AND globalizing, which makes it
  harder and harder to find the right pairs of eyes
  for your television ad.

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• Fortunately, the same forces that are creating
  1,000s of different channels are also creating
  new opportunities for local businesses looking
  for worthwhile television advertising
  opportunities.

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• Television advertising crisis small business
  opportunity
• Television has been undergoing some pretty
  seismic changes in the past 25 years. Cable TV
  originally started in places like the Appalachian
  Mountains in order to help people get better
  television reception. Back in the early 1980s,
  when networks like ESPN, MTV and CNN were
  launched, it wasnt even known if these companies
  could survive. By 1988, it seemed that these
  networks were going to make it, and the
  viewership looked something like this

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• Daytime PrimeTime
• Broadcast Television 76.9 78.8
• Ad-Supported Cable (networks like
  CNN) 13.8 11.6
• Pay TV (Showtime, HBO) 9.3 9.6

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• Cable grew steadily over the years, and
  today, ad-supported cable television has a
  stronger viewership than any other type of
  programming source.
• The following chart shows television viewership
  by programming source. You can see for yourself
  in the chart below

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• The dominance of cable television is good news
  and bad news for small advertisers.
• First, the bad news.

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• As you know from watching television, the
  choices in programming are endlessly growing.
  Every time they add something like the cooking
  channel, the fitness channel, or the Outdoor Life
  Network, another group of people becomes regular
  watchers of those channels. For big companies
  that rely on broadcast TV and its ability to get
  big audiences, this is a problem. How much has
  broadcast viewership dwindled over the years?

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• As an indicator of mainstream popularity,
  take a look at how the ratings for these seventh
  highest rated shows have dwindled over the
  years
• In 1979, MASH received an average Nielsen
  rating of 25. In 2006, Greys Anatomy received a
  Nielsen rating of 11.8. In 2010, Two and a Half
  Men received a Nielsen rating of 6.1.

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• The impact of this trend on American society
  (and on advertisers) is enormous. Back in the
  middle of the 20th century, when programming
  choices were few and large groups of people
  watched the same shows, it was relatively easy
  for large corporations to buy advertising time on
  network television and promote their megabrands.

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• A media director for Colgate-Palmolive or
  Coca Cola could simply pick their media slots on
  prime-time network television, run their ads, and
  the big audience was assured. The networks could
  charge high prices, purchase whatever programming
  they chose and profitably operate their
  businesses.

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• But today, technologies such as cable
  television, digital video recorders (that can
  skip commercials) and Internet television are
  dramatically affecting American viewership. As a
  result, the value (and the price) of network
  advertising is dropping. Thats great for Pepsi
  and Nike, but maybe not so great for you.
• Network ad rates are still far beyond what the
  average (or even the extraordinary) dental
  practice can afford.

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• But there IS good news
• In exchange for broadcast fees, ad-supported
  cable channels (like ESPN or TBS) allow for local
  businesses to run advertising. These ad-supported
  channels charge cable or satellite providers a
  certain fee per subscriber (anywhere from a few
  dollars to a few cents, depending on the
  popularity of the content), and allow them to
  earn revenues by selling a certain amount of
  advertising inventory to local advertisers.

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• This is why you might see an ad for a
  national or global brand like FedEx or Coke next
  to an ad for the pizza store down the street.

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• This trend we are describing is often referred
  to as disintermediation. It means that the
  intermediary (the television programmers) are
  experiencing a shift in their audiences, and the
  buyers of airtime (advertisers) must change their
  purchases because the large television audiences
  on network television simply dont exist as they
  once did.

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• And while disintermediation creates a unique set
  of challenges for networks, production companies,
  and large corporate advertisers, it creates an
  emerging and attractive opportunity for smaller,
  more localized businesses that might benefit from
  communicating with a more targeted audience.

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• Dental practices are uniquely positioned to
  benefit from this emerging trend.
• Because the cable companies have advertising
  inventory that they NEED TO SELL.
• In your local area, your cable system has scores
  of channels for which it has available
  advertising inventory. Some of those channels,
  such as ESPN, Fox News, or TBS, have substantial
  audiences that, in many time slots, compete with
  network programming. Other channels are likely to
  have audiences of less than 50 people.

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• Thats right, there are channels on your cable
  television system right now that are being
  watched by less than 50 people. As you can
  imagine, this inventory is being sold off at very
  cheap prices. Often, you can buy advertising
  segments on some of these local cable systems for
  as little as 5-10 per spot. And most of the
  time, you can buy advertising time on more
  popular networks for as little as 75-100 per
  spot.

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• Are we now talking about an advertising
  opportunity that seems to be in your budget?
  Before you run right out and call your local ad
  sales rep, take a few minutes with us and let us
  give you a crash course in media planning and
  buying.

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• Television media planning and buying first,
  forget high-school math
• Many of us may struggle to remember all the
  things we learned in high-school math classes. We
  feel pretty certain we understand how
  multiplication and addition work, and were
  comfortable around basic equations, but then it
  all starts to get fuzzy.

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• Fortunately, when it comes to media planning
  and buying, you can forget everything you ever
  knew about basic math. Because in media math,
  this equation makes sense
• 6 X 10000 ? 60000 X 1
• Thats right.
• Six times 10,000 does NOT equal 60,000 times 1.

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• Because an ad shown six times to 10,000 people
  does not equal the effect of an ad shown one time
  to 60,000 people.

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• The networks will actually charge you a little
  more to show your ad six times to 10,000 people
  than they will to show it once to 60,000. And at
  first glance, you might think that getting to
  show your ad to 60,000 people would result in a
  far better return than showing it to 10,000.
  After all, its a numbers game, and the more
  people who see your ad, the more people are
  likely to act on it. So why wouldnt you go for
  the ad buy that delivers six times as many
  eyeballs?

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• Well tell you why. Lets start with a
  two-million-dollar example.
• You may remember the dot-com days of the late
  nineties. Companies were fighting over Internet
  space, where untold wealth lay waiting to be
  discovered. Venture capitalists and stockholders
  alike were wildly funding Internet companies that
  promised to capture millions of online customers
  and deliver billions in profits.

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• Of course, we know in hindsight how well that
  idea worked out.
• But you may remember that some of these
  companies actually chose to spend their
  television advertising budget based on the
  principle that 60,000 eyeballs were better than
  10,000. In fact, in 2000, 17 dot-com, e-commerce
  and tech companies bet upwards of two million
  dollars that putting their ad in front of 88.5
  million pairs of eyes JUST ONCE was going to pay
  off big.

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• During the 2000 Super Bowl, hopeful upstarts
  such as Lifeminders.com, epidemic.com, and
  ourbeginning.com spent their venture capital
  money on 30 seconds of precious ad space during
  the game. And while some of these ads may have
  been entertaining or even funny, we never saw
  them before, we never saw them since, and the
  ads, like the companies that paid to produce and
  air them, are now faded memories.

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• When planning an advertising campaign, six
  times 10,000 is worth a heck of a lot more than
  one times 60,000. Successful advertising is ALL
  ABOUT REPEAT EXPOSURE.

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• On average, you can expect it to take five
  exposures to a television ad before a particular
  viewer feels as though they know or recognize
  the advertiser. If your ad is not memorable, it
  will take even more. (And it wont be memorable
  if you do what people expectlike show them
  shots of your front door, your waiting room, a
  few seconds of you, and maybe an operatory, all
  while trying to speed-read everything you do in
  your practice in 30 seconds and still have time
  left over to read your address, phone number, or
  URL.)

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• So how do you make sure you get the most out of
  your ads?
• Get the response curve working for you
• When you show your ad to the same people more
  than once, the chances that they will respond to
  it go up exponentially each time they see it.
  This is the response curve, and its your new
  best friend.
• Heres how it works.

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• As you buy advertising, people will begin to
  see your ads for the first time. And most of the
  time, if theyve never seen it before, they will
  promptly forget it. Think of your own viewing
  patterns. You turned your television set on to
  see the news, or get caught up in a movie, or
  view some sporting event. You did not turn on
  your television to find a beer that tastes great
  or a local restaurant, garage or plumber. These
  ads are interruptive, and many viewers disregard
  the ads. The ads will be less disregarded if they
  are entertaining or interesting.

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• As our dot-com friends found out in 2000, not
  even a thrilling game where the outcome hung on a
  last-second stretch to the end zone by Titan
  receiver Kevin Dyson (who came up one agonizing
  yard short!) could make you remember anything
  that Computer.com had to say, or even that
  Computer.com even existed. You watched the ad,
  promptly forgot it, and then never heard from
  them again. Really not very effective.

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• But if you had heard from them four more times,
  you might have started to become more familiar
  with their business and, perhaps, have started to
  think about the benefits of their business to you
  as a consumer.
• As an advertiser, once you have established
  familiarity and the audience feels that it
  knows you, then you get the opportunity to do
  some really effective advertising, as you come
  out with ads that communicate the benefits you
  offer, hoping to create preference in the mind
  of your audience.

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• Heres a chart that shows you exactly how much
  of a response you can expect, depending on the
  number of times your audience is exposed to your
  ad.

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• AN EXAMPLE OF AN ESTIMATED ADVERTISING RESPONSE
  CURVE
• Advertising Exposure Message Recognition
• 1.) 16.55
• 2.) 61.92
• 3.) 78.82

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• 4.) 85.12
• 5.) 87.47
• 6.) 88.34
• 7.) 88.67
• 8.) 88.79
• 9.) 88.83
• 10.) 88.85

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• Source Developments in Business Simulation
  Experiential Exercises, MODELING ADVERTISING
  MEDIA EFFECTIVENESS Hugh M. Cannon, John D.
  Leckenby, Avery M. Abernethy

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• In the table above, you can see that you make
  incremental gains as you expose people to your ad
  the second and third time. The table shown
  represents the attempt of market research experts
  to plot out a generic level of recognition
  gained by exposure to an ad. Of course,
  recognition does not equal preference or
  buying behavior, but it does, of itself,
  represent a value to any business, including your
  dental practice.

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• What the chart is saying is that the first time
  your audience sees your ad, perhaps 16 percent of
  them will feel they recognize the company.
  After three exposures, the number goes to 78.8
  percent. Can you see how showing your commercial
  three times to four people is more beneficial
  than showing your commercial one time to 12
  people?

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• Keep in mind that interesting, surprising or
  entertaining features help to heighten your
  audiences awareness and retention of your ad.
  Conversely, if your ad is generic and has nothing
  speciala catchy jingle, interesting visuals or
  humor, for examplethat makes it memorable, the
  curve will shift to the right, meaning it will
  require more exposures to achieve recognition.

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• Making sure you allocate enough budget to ensure
  optimal repetition of your ad is critical to its
  success. Please, before you blow two million
  bucks on a Super Bowl extravaganza, come talk to
  us! As we have shown you, disintermediation
  offers some incredible opportunities for
  affordable, effective television advertising. As
  audiences become more localized, fragmented, and
  smaller, advertising prices will decline to where
  there will be opportunities for a dental practice
  to target a highly relevant audience at a cost
  that ensures a good return on investment.

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• Syndicated ads the big-budget commercials
  with the little price tags
• One way to get a big-budget ad at an affordable
  price is to purchase a syndicated ad for
  dentistry.

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• A syndicated ad is shot by an advertising agency
  and then sold to local businesses in a number of
  different cities across the country. You might be
  surprised, when traveling in another city, to
  turn on the television in your hotel room, and
  see a commercial for a car dealer, jeweler or
  lawyer that looks very similar to one you
  regularly see promoting a local business in your
  hometown.

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• Thats a syndicated commercial. Using
  syndication, a local business can get celebrity
  endorsements, the advertising rights to popular
  songs, or characters portrayed by professional
  actors at a much lower price than if the
  commercial had been produced directly.

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• If youre interested in learning more about
  syndicated ads, the information is as close as
  your computer. Simply Google Dentist Television
  Commercials and youll find a number of
  companies that will sell you pre-shot ads and
  customize them with your own name, business
  information and logo.

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• The three stages of a successful television ad
  campaign
• Okay, the cost of television advertising hasnt
  scared you off, and you want to take the plunge
  and develop fresh creative instead of relying on
  the commercial-in-a-can approach that
  syndicated advertising offers. If you plan to
  develop television ads to promote your practice,
  you need to know something about the three
  progressive stages of a television ad campaign.

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• Most successful television campaigns revolve
  around three distinct objectives aided recall,
  unaided recall, and preference. Advertisers
  generally attempt to develop these objectives in
  stages. Aided recall comes first this is the
  phase in which an ad viewer might not remember
  that the Wheres the Beef ad was for Wendys,
  but when presented with a list that includes
  Arbys, Wendys and Burger King, theyll recall
  that the ad was, in fact, for Wendys.

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• When a viewer can recall your ad with some help,
  it means the ad is starting to penetrate their
  consciousness and build awareness of your brand
  or business. Unaided recall is the next, later
  phase in an ad campaign. At this stage, viewers
  will be able to recall the right brand when they
  hear the Wheres the Beef slogan. At this
  point, the advertiser has managed to instill an
  active awareness in the viewer. Once that level
  of awareness has been achieved, the final phase
  can be undertaken encouraging a preference for
  YOUR products and services over those of your
  competitors.

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• Using frequency and variety to engage your
  audience
• One thing that you will see in the syndicated
  commercialsand something that should certainly
  be a part of your television production
  planningis the development of a related series
  of commercials. These are commercials that are
  recognizably part of a series, but which
  incorporate different ideas or content in each ad.

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• This technique helps you build enough
  frequency to gain memorability, but stops your
  ads from becoming a boring and unwelcome
  intrusion into peoples television watching.
  Remember that your ad is interruptive no one
  turns on their television set because they want
  to hear from a dentist. They turn it on to be
  entertained, so the least you can do is try to
  incorporate some variety into each ad.

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• If you develop a differentiated series of
  commercials, people will start to remember your
  commercials, and will almost be intrigued at what
  comes next. If you are going to get syndicated
  commercials, you might consider getting a series
  of commercials that communicate ideas about your
  practice in an entertaining manner. That way, you
  will have content to run for a sustained period
  of time.

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• Perhaps most importantly, resist the urge to try
  to say everything you want to say in 30 or 60
  seconds. That is an incredibly short amount of
  time, and cramming your ad full of information
  and messages will overwhelm and confuse your
  viewers. We can remember one dental commercial we
  reviewed that had 26 different images (we
  counted!) in a 30 second commercial. Obviously,
  the dentist had a lot to say, but this is an
  extremely ineffective way of saying it. Limit
  yourself to two or three main benefits in each ad.

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• Measuring returns on a television ad campaign
• When dentists consider advertising, one of
  their first questions is often, What kind of
  returns can I expect to see? What theyre
  usually really asking is Will I recoup my
  investment?

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• The truth is, its very difficult to measure
  the returns in this direct way. Often, a
  television ad campaign will yield returns in
  terms of general awareness or recall, as
  described above. Most dental practices do not
  consider awareness or recall to be business
  assets in themselves, and its difficult to
  measure the effect of these assets on actual
  sales.

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• If you want to give patients the reasons to
  choose your dental practice, it is awfully hard
  to do in a 30-second commercial. If you want to
  get patients to notice you and emotionally react
  to your practice in a particular way, then
  television might be effective. In our view,
  television is a better tool for emotional
  response (branding) than it is for direct
  response. Since most practices tend to measure
  return on investment in the form of short-term
  direct response, television is not highly
  utilized by dental practices, nor is it a medium
  that most practices consider first in choosing
  marketing media.

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• Now that we have thoroughly reviewed the
  advantages and challenges of television
  advertising campaigns you have gained the
  knowledge to decide if this is worth while risk
  for your dental practice. Television is one of
  the most popular mass mediums with the potential
  for great returns, but not without risk. You
  should only attempt a television ad if

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• Your dental practice is established
• Your current dental marketing plan includes
  direct, print and online marketing campaigns
• Your marketing budget is extensive enough to
  accommodate both your current marketing plan and
  cover the cost to create good ads with the
  appropriate reach and frequency