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Profit Magazine
December 2005
IT'S TIME TO TRY TV...
TV marketing is a surprisingly affordable and effective option for your business. Just ask this entrepreneur... who tried it and liked it
By Chris Powell
PROFIT Magazine, December 2005
If you're like most entrepreneurs, TV isn't even on your short list of marketing options. You can't afford a big-budget ad airing during a top-rated show, and you don't want to sully your brand with one of those Leapin' Larry's House of Lugnuts spots that crop up during 2 a.m. telecasts of Green Acres.
Yet recent trends have made TV worth another look. The digital-video revolution means you can get a decent-looking ad made at a cut-rate price; the product-placement boom offers an economical way to expose your product to viewers; and digital channels provide cost-effective access to tightly focused audiences. Here's how one SME capitalized on these cheap and effective options.
The Ugly Mug: Great ads for under a grand.
Thanks to digital technologies, you can obtain a professional-looking TV spot for peanuts. Jim McNally, president of The Commercial Factory, a Lethbridge, Alta.-based production house, says he can, working alone on $5,000 worth of equipment including a high-end laptop, write, edit and create graphics for an ad. In 1997, that would have taken five people on various equipment, such as a $200,000 editing suite.
Such efficiencies, along with huge savings from shooting on digital video rather than film, permit McNally's firm to make a direct commercial (i.e., not using an agency) for as little as $650. For that, you'll get a script, editing, animation and music. At the high end, $4,500 will buy more effects, multiple shooting locations and professional actors.
The finished ad won't give Labatt a run for its money, but it can move product. The Commercial Factory is a fixture among winners at the Retail Commercial Awards held by the Television Bureau of Canada (TVB), in which consumers rate spots on how much they like or dislike them and how much the spots influence them to buy or try a product or service. (The TVB or Playback, a Canadian entertainment industry newspaper, can help you find a low-budget production house.)
Jean Greer McCarthy, owner of The Ugly Mug coffee shop in Lethbridge, credits an ad made by The Commercial Factory with helping to double business in 12 months. For $942, she got a 30-second spot that looks far pricier. That outlay also bought a 15-second version, a radio spot pulled from the TV audio track and a newspaper ad designed with stills from the TV ad. The Ugly Mug paid $4,500 for six weeks of air time on local TV stations, weighted towards daytime but with some prime-time slots.
Greer McCarthy says spinning off the radio and newspaper ads was a cost-effective form of integrated marketing. "Too many small businesses do not connect their ad campaigns," she notes. "Their radio is different from their television, and their print is different again. Smart use of TV allowed us to build a cohesive ad campaign."
The $942 included a voice-over from Bruce Bayley Johnson, a pro whose credits include McDonald's and Lever 2000. He says that, like many other voice actors, he now works from a home studio full of state-of-the-art equipment: "Many of us are far more open to local-market work than in the past." Bayley Johnson can do a short voice-over and e-mail it to a client for less than US$100.
"It gave an air of professionalism to our commercial," says Greer McCarthy. "New customers came in asking if we were part of a franchise. To have a recognizable, professional voice gave us immediate credibility."
The Ugly Mug |
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