TV Advertising

As the owner of a company that makes TV commercials the most common question people ask is, "What will it cost to advertise on TV?". The answer is the same as the answer to what does it cost to buy a car or a house. It will cost whatever you are willing to spend in order to get what you want.

Really bad TV commercials are often made by local cable TV advertising departments. Often they seem to do little more than setup a camera on a tripod and tell the business owner "start talking". These TV commercials might cost $1,500.00 and in my opinion are a waste of money. If you end up looking bad on TV then you've wasted the cost of the commercial, you've wasted the cost of the air time and you may have harmed the reputation of your company. In sum a cheap TV commercial may cost you a fortune.

Our company produces great TV commercials that are usually in the range of $5,000.00 to $25,000.00.

So that answers the first half of the cost to advertise on TV which is the TV commercial production cost.

The second half of the question is how much do the TV stations charge to run your commercial? This is an even more difficult question to answer. Every TV station and cable TV operator sets the price to advertise on TV not the ad agency. The 30 second TV commercial time slots sell for a different price for every show that is on TV. To make things more complicated the same show will sell TV spot time for different prices in every different city. For example if you want to advertise on CNN in a small town you'll pay less than you would if you wanted to advertise on CNN at the exact same time of day in a big city. The reason has to do with exposure. The more people that might see your commercial the more the station will charge.

I know I know you still are wondering what it will cost to advertise on TV. We advertise on one show to reach women and another show to reach children. There are other shows that are often viewed by married couples or the entire family. Every show in every city sells their 30 second time slots at different prices.

The minimum that any TV station will accept to begin advertising for a client is $1,500.00 per month. However, it is not unusual to have a client invest $10,000.00 or $50,000.00 or more per month in one city. It all depends upon who you are trying to reach, in what city and with what monthly TV advertising budget.

The most important thing to consider is two advertising terms "Reach" and "Frequency". In general we want the advertising budget to be big enough that we can reach about 25% of the targeted population about 15 times in order to have our TV advertising make some impact. As an example if you have $50,000.00 and you'd like to run your TV commercial once on national TV you would be throwing away $50,000.00. Think about it; when was the last time that YOU saw something on TV just once and went out and purchased that product or service? Most likely your answer would be "Never". Now if we took your $50,000.00 budget and ran your commercials in one major demographic market area we could get a large part of the population to see your spot several times. This is when people start to feel comfortable with your company and develop trust. After the population feels like they know and trust your company then that is when they make the decision to buy your products or services.

This is not to say that if you don't have $50,000.00 with which to advertise on TV then don't bother. This is just an example and reaching 25% YOUR target demographic 15 times could cost a lot less or a lot more.

Please click if your are ready to begin and would like to have a TV commercial produced or start TV advertising for your business.

Here is an interesting comment I've heard from people before. People have this idea that a bigger ad agency that does more media buying will get better rates from the TV stations. The other common misconception is that if they spend more on TV advertising we will give them a better price. This is one of those statements that sounds like it should be true but it is not true at all. We believe it is true because we have always heard that buying in bulk will get you a better price. This works with a lot of things such as cars for example. If you own a rental car business and you need to buy 100 cars for one of your locations then the local auto dealership will give you their best price because they want to sell 100 cars to you. It even works with newspaper advertising; if you want to buy full page ads every day then you'll get a great deal from the newspapers. It just doesn't work with TV advertising and to understand why we first have to consider why it DOES work with so many other things. A car dealership can sell 50 or 100 or 200 cars per month, the more they sell the more money they make. If you want to buy 100 cars then they will give you a great deal because they don't want to lose your business to some other dealership. The newspaper will just print more pages if you want to run full page ads.

So why won't the biggest ad agency get the best deal on TV advertising?

The problem is that in every 30 minute TV show there are a fixed number of TV commercials that can run. The TV stations can't thrown in a couple of extra commercials and make more money that way. The only way a TV station makes more money is by selling the fixed number of spots available to the highest bidder. Just to pick a random number suppose that a TV station wants $100.00 each time your spot runs. Now let's say that the biggest ad agency in the United States tells the station that they will pay $80.00 each time one of their spots runs. It is very likely that the TV station will accept that offer. They will accept that offer until someone else offers $81.00 each time a spot runs. If the stations actually did give the lowest price to the biggest ad agency then everyone in the United States would do all of their media buying through the one largest ad agency in the United States. This in turn would mean that the TV stations all have only one client, that huge ad agency. What's worse is that the TV stations would now be locked into selling air time at dirt cheap prices to that one ad agency. Since there are only a fixed number of TV commercials that can run every half hour the TV stations actually sell air time to the highest bidder not to the biggest ad agency.

Think about it, what would you do if YOU owned a TV station?

Would you sell advertising to the biggest agency at the cheapest price or sell to the highest bidder? Still not sure yet? Think about it this way suppose Mother's Day or some other holiday is coming up and every retail store wants to advertise on TV. Now you only have a fixed number of spots that you can sell and everyone wants them. So do you give your air time to the big agency at the cheapest price or let all the retailers and jewelry stores try to out bid each other? RIGHT! You would sell TV air time to the highest bidder and that is exactly what the TV stations do too!