We have clients who take the opportunity to shoot quick client testimonials on their smartphones or campact cameras, and send them to us for editing. This is the advice we give them, to help us all deliver the most professional and persuasive video:
How To Shoot A Great Testimonial Video With Your Phone
How Much Does A TV Commercial Cost? – Part Two
In Part One, How Much Does A TV Commercial Cost? We covered why TV commercials can seem to be expensive, gave real-life cost examples, and showed which elements drive the cost of production up. In Part Two, How Much Should You Spend On A TV Commercial? we discuss the four major budgeting methods you can use to determine how much you should spend on your TV commercial.
How Much Does A TV Commercial Cost? – Part One
How much does a TV commercial cost? This is the most frequent and the most difficult question we are asked. The short answer is between $2,000 and $2 million. We’re not being flippant. Every TV commercial has to be different from every other so that it stands out on TV. This means every commercial has a different script, different ingredients, and therefore, a totally different set of costs.
HOW BRANDS WORK – part two
In Part 1 we discovered two significant truths. BRANDING IS THE RELATIONSHIP A CONSUMER HAS WITH YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE. Branding isn’t a look and feel, a style, a colour, a typeface, or a set of attributes. A brand comprises the sum of the feelings a consumer has about his or her lifetime of interaction with your product, service and/or organisation. THEREFORE BRANDS ARE CREATED NOT BY MARKETERS, BUT BY CONSUMERS.
HOW BRANDS WORK – part one
As a 17 year old copywriter, I was given the opportunity to learn brand strategy and positioning in what was, perhaps, the greatest brand management university that has ever existed. Unfortunately, that opportunity will never be offered to anyone, ever again. Because, due to social pressure, the university is closed for good.
DVDs ARE DYING
Your company’s promotional DVD could be a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy your presentation at the worst possible moment. Cheap, no-name DVDs frequently fail. And they can fail at the most critical point in your pitch. The best disc manufacturers are Taiyo Yuden and Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation. Taiyo Yuden owns the JVC disc brand. Mitsubishi owns the Verbatim disc brand. But brand names alone are no guarantee of top quality.
Corporate Videos. Marketing Videos. What’s The Difference?
While working through the keywords for our Adwords campaign, we noticed that the search terms people use to find us often don’t match the type of video they are seeking information about. The main confusion appears to be over Corporate Videos, Marketing Videos, Product Videos and Sales Videos. This got us thinking. As video professionals, we should be doing our bit to help clear up this confusion. So here’s a list of […]
How $700 Of TV Media Brought Advertising Success
You’d be surprised how often we hear the same story: They’re a small or medium sized business. They’ve maxed out their online marketing channels. Their market segment is getting crowded as their competitors do the same. They need to: Grow revenue and profitability Drive more cost-effective sales Take a dominant position in a competitive market niche Add value to their business by building a branded presence in the market Does this sound […]
A Direct Campaign With 200 Billion Impressions. Cool Bananas!
Ecuador has a lot to offer tourists: tropical beaches, brilliant diving, fabulous seafood, the Galapagos Islands, the snow-capped Andes, the Amazon jungle, Spanish, Inca and pre-Inca heritage. A couple of hours flight-time from Miami. Trouble is, not enough tourists know about Ecuador which doesn’t have the money to splash on an international awareness campaign. But it does export 24 million tonnes of bananas each year to North America, Asia and Europe.
Why Resource Companies Need Corporate Videos
Investors have a mountain of investment choices. Are you doing enough to distinguish yourself from their other investment opportunities? Now, more than ever, miners and explorers need to win back the confidence of investors and reassure them that commodity prices have a bright future. And that’s exactly what a persuasive corporate video can do. It’s the communication tool that makes shareholders, analysts and investors catch the essence of your vision, understand the […]
Video Production: How To Budget & Brief
Video production is an unknown field for most clients. So, naturally, you’ll have a hard time objectively judging the effectiveness of the script, and understanding which elements in the video production quote are essential, and which can be dispensed with to save money without compromising the message. However, there are a few simple things you can do to manage the video brief so that you get outcomes that you can understand and […]
How To Write A Direct Response TV Commercial
You can create a Direct Response TV commercial which makes people do exactly what you tell them to. But only if you meet some prerequisites. The key is to understand what makes people take action. Here it is: People will take action to move towards a goal, to remove a block to a goal, or to resolve a state of tension. A good DRTV commercial will introduce the product and its benefits. […]
TV Advertising: First Get Your Online Ducks In A Row
Folks in the search business are very aware that TV advertising drives web traffic: via search and direct to websites. In fact, the quickest, easiest, and lowest-cost way of increasing leads and sales for your business from your TV advertising campaign is SEO and Google AdWords. This should be an essential ingredient in any TV advertising plan, because it not only delivers leads, sales enquiries and customers, it also provides accurate and […]
When The Pilot Says “Uh-oh.”
Shaun reckons the worst thing you can ever hear a helicopter pilot say is “Uh-oh” because you don’t know whether he just realised he forgot his lunch or you’re all about to die. When we’re shooting aerial video, I don’t look out the window, because I have to watch the monitor. Just a few shoots ago, we were flying up a forested valley, filming a cable car which ran up to the […]
How To Make Your TV Advertising Work 28% Better
A 28% increase in the response to your TV commercial could mean the difference between failure and success. It’s too important to ignore. And the opportunity to grab hold of this advantage has been created by a fuzzy new vista called the ‘cross-media landscape’. For the last five years, the online and TV worlds have been converging. People are watching as much online video as they watch TV. ISPs offer streaming TV and […]
TV Advertising Fundamentals: Test, Test & Test
When planning your first TV campaign, the best thing you can do is test, test, and test. Test a number of different messages online as banner ads, and then use the top performing one or two as guides to the message in your TV commercial. If possible, produce two different versions of your commercial, each with a different message based on the two top performing banner ads. Select a small market for […]
Brand, Retail Or DRTV. Which TV Campaign Is Right For You?
While you’d expect brand, retail and direct response commercials to be different, it might surprise you to know how vastly different the media footprints must be for each type of campaign to do its job cost-effectively. With brand or retail campaigns, a narrower schedule with more frequency will return more sales than a campaign that tries to reach your total market with less frequency. With Direct Response, the opposite applies. You don’t […]
Simple Secrets For First-Time TV Advertisers
Smaller advertisers can’t afford to replicate the strategy of big advertisers. Instead, they have to be careful and use their budget judiciously. For example, prime-time TV is popular with big advertisers. It’s great for national brands that need to get a message out to their whole market simultaneously, for a national product launch or a sale, for example. But prime-time media has a number of disadvantages that will bite small and medium-size […]
How TV Advertising Makes Online Marketers Market Leaders
As the other players in your market segment become proficient at online marketing, the fight for market share becomes tighter. And it’s increasingly hard to put distance between yourself and your competition. So instead of trying to outbid your competitors for online customers, wouldn’t it be better to step outside that arena and reach a vast, new, untapped market? TV gives you access to the millions of potential customers who you (and […]
TV Advertising: Why 100% Reach Is Out Of Reach
As in most consumption-based systems, Pareto’s Law applies to media as well. While you can probably reach 60-70% of your target market cost-effectively, after that, the cost per additional percentage point climbs astronomically. And reaching the last 10% of your market can consume 90% of your budget. Over the years, working with clients who have smaller TV budgets, we have observed that by aiming at a smaller percentage of the total target […]