What Can Post-Christmas Ad Spending Tell Us About the Coming Year?
A look at which campaigns took advantage of the best media of the year
‘Twas the day after Christmas, and all through the land … a giant sucking sound could be heard as major brands pulled out of TV ad market. If you listened closely enough, you could also hear the scurrying of DR mice as we ate up all those great opportunities.
For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, below is a quick primer on how direct-response television (DRTV) advertising works. Seasoned veterans can feel free to skip to the next section.
How DRTV Advertising Works
TV networks often have extra inventory (i.e. air time) that they are willing to sell at a discount. Certain media agencies have a standing invitation to these ‘auctions’ and constantly place bids on behalf of their clients. Since the clients know their return on ad spend (ROAS) for TV, they’re able to make smart bids. The end result is that DRTV advertising dollars go much further than the traditional ‘spend and pray’ budgets set by general advertisers.
Of course, there are drawbacks to this approach. For one thing, you have to take what you can get. There’s also no guarantee your bid will win out. If a higher bid comes along before the deadline, the network will accept it and reject yours. Sometimes this happens at the last minute: You expect to air, but you’re pre-empted. That’s why it takes a highly competent agency who specializes in this stuff to make DRTV ad strategies work. (Shout out to my friends at LWD.)
This brings us back to the night after Christmas. Every major brand believes the weeks leading up to Christmas are the best time of year to sell their products. Even carmakers believe this. As a result, lots of money chases limited air time and, per the laws of economics, prices go up. Way up. Again, we in DR know our numbers, so we know we cannot compete for air time during this time of year. We scurry away — and wait.
Santa does his thing. Someone somewhere gets a Lexus with a bow (I guess?), and then the major brands lose all interest in paying top dollar for advertising. They get busy selling their extra inventory at a discount, and the last thing they want to do is deepen those losses with big ad spending. That’s when we scurry back.
There is no hard-and-fast rule, but I can tell you from 21 years of experience that advertising rates can go as low as 10 cents on the dollar during this seasonal ‘auction.’ Media is tighter and less discounted these days, but when I started in the industry a hot campaign could afford to buy “the world’s supply of media” at this time of year (as my old boss used to put it).
That brings me to the point of today’s article.
What Post-Christmas Spending Could Mean
As my “Chart Watch” feature has demonstrated, we can learn a lot about hot products, trends and categories by reviewing what campaigns are at the top of the DRMetrix report. Such ‘hits charts’ have always been based on some method for determining who is spending the most on TV. (Here’s how DRMetrix goes about it.)
Going back to TV ROAS and the methods of direct-response advertisers, this implies that the bigger spenders are getting the better ROI — and that implies consumer demand is strongest for the stuff at the top of the charts.
Still with me? OK, now let’s think about the top of the charts right after Christmas. Everyone in DR knows this is the best time to buy TV time, so which campaigns will they favor? I can think of two possibilities:
Those with the most promise for the coming year
Those that were good, but not good enough, in the past year
Option #1 shouldn’t require much explanation. More spending drives more sales at retail and/or ‘eTail’ (e.g. Amazon) and introduces more people to a brand. True, consumers may not be in a buying mood after melting their credit cards in the run-up to Christmas. But then it’s also true that consumers have been trained to hunt for deals after the holidays, and there are well-known techniques for convincing people they’re getting a great deal.
Option #2 is more complicated to explain, but I’ll give it a shot. Imagine you have a campaign with a ROAS that is just short of profitability. As the acronym suggests, there are two ways you can fix this: improve your return or reduce the cost of your ad spend. Like any smart direct marketer, you first put effort into improving your return. You test new creative approaches, new offers and upsells, and optimize your conversion rates. But in the end, none of that completely solves your revenue problem. What do you do?
You change the other variable by reducing your ad spend. For most, that would mean slower sales and a much longer wait to get your money out of inventory. But in the DR world, as described above, you can also try bidding lower for media. Such bids could very well be rejected if better ones are on the table, but there is a time of year when even low bids tend to get accepted...
With this in mind, I now present to you the top 20 campaigns for the period beginning December 26 and ending this past Sunday (i.e. the end of the media year). I leave it to you to decide if these campaigns indicate what products, categories or trends are looking good for 2024 — or if these were simply near-miss items that will quietly disappear once they sell out.
The Post-Christmas True Top 20
Bullseye Pro (Emson)
Pooph (Ikigai)
Miracle Smile (Ontel)
Granitestone Piezano (Emson)
Copper Fit Energy Socks (IdeaVillage)
Contour Swan Pillow (Contour Products)
GraniteStone Emerald Green (Emson)
AquaCare (Interlink)
Copper Fit Arch Relief Plus (IdeaVillage)
BeActive Plus (Top Dog)
Bell+Howell Bionic Spotlight (Emson)
Bell+Howell Bionic Floodlight (Emson)
Red Dog Universal Socket (BulbHead)
Slim Mint (BulbHead)
MicroTouch Titanium Head Shaver (IdeaVillage)
Copper Fit X Back (IdeaVillage) see below
Gotham Steel Cookware Set (Emson)
GraniteStone Armor Max (Emson)
Gotham Steel Hard Anodized (Emson)
Mighty Mendit (Top Dog) see below
Source: AsOnTV Retail Rankings, 12/26-12/31/2023, DRMetrix
Recent Tests
An important caveat to the above analysis: Sometimes DR marketers simply test new commercials during the post-Christmas period. That seems to be the case with the two commercials below.
I never like to test at this time of year for the obvious reason that any result will be greatly distorted by the artificially low media rates. That means a lot of adjusting must be done to get a real sense of things … and DR marketers are notoriously bad at making realistic adjustments. To each his own, I guess.
Copper Fit X Back
Pitch: “Evenly distributes the support across a broader surface area of your back”
Offer: 2 pay of $29.99 for one with free shipping
Marketer: IdeaVillage
Producer: Blue Reef
This is the 34th Copper Fit commercial I’ve archived since the brand began — although it has been a while since IdeaVillage put out a back product.
Last year, they tried a new compression sock (Copper Fit Arch Strong) and a pet blanket for some reason (Copper Fit Comfy Zone). The last back product under this brand was Copper Fit Advanced Back Pro, which first came out in June of 2018.
DID YOU KNOW that I’ve been collecting and analyzing ‘As Seen on TV’ commercials since 2007? Support my work by becoming a paying subscriber, and I’ll give you access to my complete, searchable archive. I call it “The Library of DRTV,” and I update it every week. It’s the ultimate DR research tool!
Mighty Mendit (2024)
Pitch: “The fast, easy way to mend, hem and wear it again”
Offer: $29.99 for three bottles (triple offer) + travel size, Mighty Gemit & idea guide
Starring: The late great Billy Mays
Marketer: Top Dog
Producer: Hutton Miller
Before you ask, here’s how they are handling the obvious:
From a marketing standpoint, and also a respect and sensitivity standpoint, I like it. It also feels ‘on trend’ these days as there is a lot of nostalgia for the celebrities of the past. I mean, Dolly Parton is 77 and started recording in the 1960s — yet she just had her first No. 1 ranking on the Billboard charts.
Would anyone be surprised if Billy hit No. 1 on the DR charts? Has anyone ever come close to his level of TV salesmanship?
