Direct Response Television Advertising Rates. Direct response television can be a powerful and cost effective advertising complement lifting response rates...

Direct Response Television Advertising Rates

Direct response television advertising. DRTV -- which gained notoriety in the 70s with half-hour infomercials that ran in the middle of the night hawking everything from Ginzu knives to the latest exercise fad - has come of age and is now used by myriad mainstream advertisers.

Today, such well-known companies as Spiegel, AT&T and Rubbermaid employ direct response television spots to cost-effectively build sales, generate leads and lift direct mail response rates. According to the Direct Marketing Association, last year U.S. companies invested $22 billion in DRTV advertising, almost 40% of all television advertising expenditures.

The allure of DRTV lies in the fact that it provides an extremely cost-effective and measurable way to reach a highly targeted audience. Both broadcast and cable networks accept 30-second, 60-second and 120-second direct response commercials at considerably discounted rates.

In fact, direct response spots can usually be purchased for half the cost of traditional spots and are often discounted as much as 80 percent. To qualify for these deeply discounted direct response rates your commercial must contain a call to action and a phone number. Almost all networks and stations now allow direct response advertisers to include a website address as well.

The reason networks offer discounted rates for direct response spots is because they run direct response spots in time slots they were not able to sell to traditional advertisers at traditional rates. This means that your commercial will run pending availability, can be pre-empted without notice and carries none of the audience guarantees normally offered to advertisers paying higher rates.