Because there is a much easier way of marketing your products and services.

Please consider this piece of evidence:

P & G wished to evaluate an advertising technique and asked that Dr. N.Roberto, Coca-Cola Foundation Professor of International Marketing, to evaluate over $10 million of independent research examining the effectiveness of this technique, that claimed to make advertising more effective and accountable.

His conclusion:

"The interactive programme and the participating products generated recall scores that are more than 50% more productive than normal advertising. The effect on purchase intention is just as impressive if not much more.

All these productivity increments are attainable at a reasonably inexpensive budget with one client revealing that for its participating brand, its quarter television expenditure was $5.7 million as compared to its budget for this technique of $0.5 million. This 1:10 ratio has been obtained in a number of countries."
Source: AGB: Gallup: Martyn Research: Bourke: NOP. City Insights & more.

This technique creates a personal dialogue between your brand(s) and your customer and is truly interactive. One of the many benefits that this interaction brings to you is that you can use existing media to create really effective and accountable programmes.

This would then allow you to generate the sort of results demonstrated above and, at the same time, make your existing reach and frequency model on television work that much harder! Demonstrably so!

And you don't have to change a thing…you can continue your current advertising, with the additional advantage of positively developing it as a result of the feedback you generate, making it even more effective.

So, ten times more effective, without changing anything. Don't you think that that's an opportunity to good to be missed?

When interactive "events" have been prepared together with a direct request for the viewer to pay particular attention to participating TV commercials, there is a substantial and measurable lift in brand awareness and message comprehension, which always lead to increases in sales.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of interactive programmes linked to terrestrial TV here are just some examples of the increases recorded by independent research.

Sources: AGB, NOP, Gallup

According to Gallup the four participating brands, Birds Eye Fish Fingers, Sara Lee, Sunsilk Shampoo, Duracell Batteries experienced an average increase in awareness of television advertising of 231%.

These results are just the tip of the iceberg in demonstrating that terrestrial TV aligned with interactive events can produce staggering increases in all key measurements, including sales.

The first rule of your advertising, obviously, is to get noticed but that is easier said than done. In the advertising arena everyone is trying to get noticed and as is clearly accepted these days, this results in substantial levels of clutter.

However, link terrestrial TV to interactive "events" in print and you will discover, that your job of creating additional sales becomes much, much, easier. And isn't that what you want, an easier job with less hassle?

The one problem facing interactive advertising is the fact that it has become a cliché in recent years, without any very clear or consistent definition of what the word means or how it is supposed to work.

Properly executed it has none of the theorising that lies behind the arguments about various forms of so-called interactive communication using direct marketing and electronic media (most of which involves at best the minimum of true interactivity).

It is both practical and down-to-earth and uses a readily comprehensible and verified mechanism to expand the relevance and salience of advertising and other forms of marketing communications. You can apply it to all of the major media and to various other forms of communication, including new media. There is no theoretical reason why it should not also be applied to packaging designs or product literature.

So why the need for interactive "Events"?

There is a clear understanding nowadays, that your customers want to be taken account of; to affect change; to learn about your products that they buy and to personalise their relationships with you and your messages. There are a phenomenal number of reasons that cause people to interact, which go far beyond just giving them things.

To feel part of the process of developing products and services that they want and are willing to buy has much more value and allowing your customers to do so, builds their trust.

When people participate in your interactive advertising they are told that their efforts and feedback are of positive help to you and, therefore, to them. Moreover, by participating, they then learn and understand the message from you and personalise their relationship with you and your products or services by becoming involved. And it could be said that involvement is the parent of trust.

Consumers tend to filter out information they do not want to hear and this alters the effectiveness of your advertising in quite a dramatic way. The purchaser's decision is invariably a compromise and this leads to a certain amount of anxiety. They worry that perhaps the purchase decision was not the best or right one. In order to minimise this anxiety the purchaser seeks to reinforce his choice and begins to take more notice of his chosen product's advertising. And, at the same time, the purchaser deliberately suppresses data, which might challenge his decision by ignoring the advertising of your brands.

People are often loyal to a brand simply because they do not want to readdress a decision. The opportunity to screen out undesired data always exists when media advertisements have to stand on there own and fight for attention.

Interactive Communication takes the consumer through the barrier of not wanting to address change; and this is certainly a market your will want to influence and capture - the people who use your competitors' products.

Now the consumer can say 'Yes, I will change my behaviour and I have a very good reason or series of reasons why", and have a well-informed opinion or image in mind.

If someone enters into a product purchase decision with a very specific image of the product and its reason to exist and why they have decided those reasons are worth its purchase, the test is, in reality; the use of the product. If the product delivers, this will confirm that premise and, therefore, conversion will be enormously enhanced.

Interactive Marketing Communication turns your passive one way advertising into active advertising and actually alters behaviour during the communication and learning process.