Point-To-Point Marketing and Savage Media Group have launched “Octopus,” a new sales tool to interactively connect listeners to stations’ advertisers. By combining radio’s capacity to reach mass audiences with the interactivity of the Internet, “Octopus” provides advertisers an enhancement to their radio spot campaigns with the value-added benefit of one-on-one marketing that’s measurable.
“Octopus” was created to boost stations’ non-spot revenue efforts to help recapture dollars lost to the Internet. Much of this shift is due to the Internet’s ability to measure response levels as it “pulls” consumers seeking information about a product or company. Octopus melds that “pull” with radio’s “push” of ad messages, resulting in a platform for advertisers’ database marketing efforts.
Savage Media Group President Scott Savage tells RBR a radio salesperson will be on a sales call, selling a spot schedule. At the end of the call, this would be sold as a supplement to a schedule where in the commercial copy for the client, they will mention a keyword, for example “furniture set,” and invite listeners to go to the station’s website. On the homepage will be a keyword box. Listeners will enter the keyword, which will then link them to a microsite Savage Media/PTP creates for the client. When they submit their contact info on that microsite, they are able to redeem whatever offer is being made.
“The offer has to be something really compelling,” says Savage. “Like on Cumulus’ KTCK The Ticket in Dallas last month, Ticketmaster was giving away bowl tickets in a contest format. A computer store was giving away a free 1-gig flash drive.”
They then submit their email address and go to another page—it could be a couple survey questions. They then finish it up and in about 30 seconds they’ll get a thank you email from the client. The client gets an email at the same time informing them of the new contact info.
“This is what the internet is all about now,” Savage tells us. “Database marketing. Clients are mining for the best possible prospective customers that they can find.”
Octopus uses a “cost-per-action” (variable expense—five to 20 dollars, depending on the industry/average transactions) pricing model. Advertisers and radio stations only pay for the service when results occur—all the way down to submission of contact info. Based on the results of test campaigns aired on the Ticket last month, Savage found Octopus capable of producing annual non-spot revenue that’s about twice a station’s weekly cumulative audience. “And that’s without requiring the station give up inventory, add staff or any new expenses,” says Savage. “When stations negotiate a rate with the client, we get paid a very small portion of that. So our model is based on the volume and we’ve done formulas based on stations’ cumes and how much they can actually generate based on the response rates were seeing. So it’s all treated as a variable expense by the station.”
Octopus will have a major presence at the RAB’s sales conference in Atlanta Feb. 11-13. See the flash presentation at ptpoctopus.com.
