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.