Digital TV & The Effect On Personal Injury Advertising

Digital TV starts with a Look-A-Like Audience that we get from Facebook to find out what demographics, interests and behaviors our perfect clients have. With that in hand we can now pair that with their TV watching habits. While we all know that TV is typically a shotgun approach to advertising, by making a look-a-like audience for our TV buy it will narrow the audience down from being very large to being a little more targeted. It’s nothing like Facebook that looks at tens of thousands of data points, on Digital TV we look at maybe a thousand data points to narrow down our audience. While this is an improvement over traditional TV buys and offers the scalability of regular TV, it still is missing the predictability of Facebook and we also have not mitigated the risk of advertising where a spot can bomb and you’ve spent $25,000+ and get no sign-ups.

So we knew we had more work to do. We needed to find a way to mitigate some of the risks.

Think about it in another way, what if we told the TV stations that by using our “Cost Per Action” model, we would actually be able to pay them more then they got from regular CPM or Spot advertising if the TV Spot ran to the Correct audience? So you show the TV Stations the upside and then of course you test and you test and then you test some more to get a WIN-WIN between our clients, the TV stations and the victims getting help. So now we have mitigated the risk by off-loading the risk onto the Media or the TV stations to make it work within our preset economics or they don’t get paid.

You can imagine the TV stations selling a spot on a “Cost Per Action’ getting no actions on the offer. Well I am sure in most cases it will only run one time as they did not make their money on it. What about the Law Firms when they run TV Advertising? Do you honestly think they understand their attribution metrics so well where they can stop a spot after one insertion because they did not see any actions on the offer? I think the law firm becomes the sucker, and will just keep paying the TV advertising without any RISK mitigation and after the campaign is done say “Well you can’t win every time” and chock it up to (name your own excuse here)…In my book and in a digital world these risks are called inefficiencies that do not help the Law Firm, or the victims, so they have to be eliminated.

Digital TV: Predictability

So we are down to one metric we need to square away and that is predictability. If you ask 100 X Social Media Clients what they will say they like the best about advertising on Social Media platforms with digital advertising is it’s the predictability of the results coming out the other end. For long term success in any business you have to have predictability to succeed. You get predictability from knowing your metrics and having enough data so the AI algorithm and Machine Learning on top can do its job on the advertising platform. Now unfortunately we have none of that on TV that we can work with, but we do have metrics we control. Let me explain.

We have two metrics we can control. One being the “Cost Per Action”. To understand Cost per action it goes something like this. We will report back to the TV stations the number of people taking action on our offer, taking action means they call the 800 number and they talk to our intake for 30sec maybe 1 min depending on what deal we can make with the stations. So we now take no risk when we advertise on Digital TV as we only pay when people call our intake and stay on the phone for a minimum of 30seconds. That of course leads to optimization on the intake side of things where you can ask 1-3 questions right up front to increase the probability of the caller qualifying.

SO the Intake script all of a sudden becomes really important because we want to accomplish 2 things; First, we want to make sure that people are qualified and we want to be honest with the TV station on what we are seeing as the more money the traffic from the TV station makes the TV Station the more inclined they will be to run our offer. So we move our intake questions around a little bit so that the main qualifying questions are up front and within the first 30 seconds.

Example Zantac Intake Script for Digital TV

1. Did you take Zantac Over The Counter or via a prescription ? Yes/NO
2. Have you been diagnosed with a Cancer ? What Cancer ?

Getting this out of the way early you have put up the main qualifying criteria and you are now ready to pay the TV station for an “Action.” Lets say we pay $100 per Action.

The second metric we can control is Conversion Rate. With big data we know that once you run a ton of traffic the conversion rate on that traffic stays pretty predictable over time. True you don’t know the conversion rate up front but after a couple $100,000 on each Mass Tort X Social Media will know it and share it on our website with our clients. So lets say that on our example above our conversion rate in 15%. That means for every 6.4 people I talk to I get one conversion (Signed Case). So our Cost Per Action offer for Zantac of $100 and with a conversion rate of 15%, gives us a final case cost for the advertising of $640.