When you’re
out fishing, you get your scorecard in real time. You know how many fish you’re
catching — or at very least how many are taking your offering. When that
happens, you know you’re doing something right.
On the
other hand, if you’re not catching fish, you often don’t know why. It could be
that you’re doing something wrong — a clumsy approach, bad technique, poor
choice of fly or bait, whatever. Or it could be that you’re fishing a good
piece of water and the fish simply aren’t there or aren’t feeding at the
moment. Hard to say.
In other
words, it’s like advertising in some respects. Which is why a common saying,
attributed to F.W. Woolworth and others, is, “Half the money I spend on
advertising is wasted. The problem is, I don’t know which half.”
The Author on Television
I used that
quote in a post two months ago, in which I said I was going to do a test on
advertising my mystery novel, Not Death, But Love, on cable TV. At the time of the posting, I’d just signed an
agreement to run a 30-second spot in a relatively small
cable market (Monterey County, CA) to see what sort of bump it would provide
for my book sales.
It was
clearly an experiment. Based on the number of people who would be seeing it,
there was no way I could sell enough copies of the book to pay the whole cost
of the ad. However, I reasoned that if I got a discernibly good response, that
would tell me that this sort of advertising can be effective, and the next step
would be to see how to use the video tool in a more cost-effective way.
I worked
with a cable consultant to come up with a package that would put the spot in
front of a large number of women aged 35-64, a good target market for my type
of mystery. It ran a couple hundred times on six different channels in the
market, and the results are now in.
It failed
utterly.
What Went Wrong?
Like the
angler who thinks he’s doing things right, but getting no love from the fish, I
was perplexed. I had expected I’d see at minimum a modest boost in sales from
the ad, yet during the two weeks it was running, I sold fewer books than I had
the prior two weeks. And the prior two weeks were slow, so sales in the ad
period couldn’t even clear a very low bar. No way you can put lipstick on that
pig.
So the
question is why did it fail? The reasons I can think of include: The ad wasn’t
good; the book was wrong for the target market; the brief experiment didn’t
connect with enough repeat viewers; requiring people to go to Amazon to buy the
book may have been too much to ask; people screen out TV ads and nobody saw it;
people needed to see it a couple more times before taking action.
My gut
sense is that it likely wasn’t the first two reasons, and that the problem had
more to do with the fact of hitting an audience with a completely unknown
product. In such a case, it would probably take more ad repetitions than I
could afford to drive a fair number of people to log on to Amazon and buy the
book. Well, that’s my best guess anyway.
