TV Commercial Production - TV Advertising

Let's make an example of how a TV advertising campaign might work. We'll compare the cost of advertising on TV with the cost of some other form of advertising such as direct mail or newspaper advertising. If you own a business in an area where there are 1,000,000 people how can you get your marketing message out to them in a cost effective way? You could run an ad in the newspaper or have a postcard designed and mailed out in your area. It isn't only the cost of each advertising method that should be considered it is also the effectiveness that has to be examined as well.

Newspapers are typically read by educated people age 50 and above. This is great news only if your best prospect is a well educated person over the age of 50. Also, we have the problem of running an ad once and hoping people will see the ad. What if our ad was too small and didn't get noticed? To be effective in newspaper advertising we have to be consistent and keep running our ads over a period of time if we are to see results.

Another option is direct mailing a postcard to our potential clients. Postcards just like newspaper ads need to be designed. There are a couple of extra steps in direct mailing your prospects. You'll need to buy a list of the people you are trying to target. So far this option is looking better than newspaper advertising because we can target who we want to have viewing our message. If 1,000,000 people live within the area serviced by our business this doesn't mean that we have 1,000,000 prospects. For our example let's imagine that only 10% or a total of 100,000 people would ever have any use or desire for the products or services offered by our business. If that is the case then we only need to print 100,000 postcards. For a moment let's pretend that we have a friend who works at an ad agency and we get our postcard designed for free. We are going to say that there is another friend who compiled the list of 100,000 prospects and gave us that for free. Let's also pretend that we have a friend, a really great friend who will print our 100,000 postcards for free. I want to assume that our only cost here is the cost of postage. If we keep our postcard size just right and sort everything just right maybe we could pay as little as $0.25 per postcard to mail them. So 100,000 postcards mailed at $0.25 each is $25,000.00. Now what did our $25,000.00 in postage buy us? We put a card in the mailbox of 100,000 people one time. We hope these people will look at our postcard and be interested in what we are offering them and that they will take action and buy what we are selling. We also know that what we did is called "Junk Mail". Junk Mailing works because if we are selling an expensive enough product or service it is ok to spend $25,000.00 to reach 100,000 people once even if most people throw away the postcard. This is why we see certain types of businesses advertising with direct mail. Car dealerships, furniture stores, hospitals and plenty of other businesses can afford to direct mail.

Now let's look at TV advertising and we will keep the same dollar amount in mind. We can have a TV commercial like the one shown here produced for $5,000.00. This leaves us $20,000.00 to use buying TV time. We could spread this budget out over three months. Just like direct mail TV advertising allows us to target who we want to reach. Thanks to the Neilson ratings we know in general what type of people are most likely to be watching each TV show. So if a buyer of our products is women aged 35-55 we know which TV shows would have the greatest proportion of our typical client watching. Depending upon exactly what show we decide to advertise on and the city where we want the ads to run the cost of buying time on that show could allow our commercial to run a few hundred times or a few thousand times. Of course nobody will see our TV commercial every time it runs but by running our commercial often enough we build up brand recognition and people will begin to have confidence in that brand because they have seen it so many times.

These are the reasons that although our company does offer all types of advertising, TV advertising is often the best option for many clients.