How much is a commercial?

Jon Starr

Jon Starr

Veteran
So I'm in a marketing class and we have to make a proposal for a marketting campaign. One of the things we'd like to do is commercials for a product. Of course we'd have to come up with a budget but I have no clue what some things would cost. I wouldn't want to be a quite a few thousand off in the final proposal (even though he's fine with us making up numbers).

How much do commercials usually cost? Obviously they vary, but let's say a very nice commercial that doesn't require too much in terms of acting talent, yet probably more in terms of editing? Just an average or a range would help me. We can, of course, pretend we have millions of dollars to do this.

Then there's a question of cost for airing? I'm not even sure how it works, but say a lot of coverage? Would anyone here know an approx. for that? Would anyone have any info on airing it on tv stations? does it cost more depending? Are there time slots you choose and they cost different? Does it cost different in terms of how often it gets aired?

Any help would really be appreciated! Thanks!
 
It depends.

Ha! Sorry, couldn't resist. Now, bear in mind that I'm an ad writer/creative director, so while I have paid attention to what things cost, I'm as much in the know as a producer would be. If you'd like me to harass one my agency producer friends, let me know. On average, a spot that airs on broadcast TV costs $350k, last I heard. The most expensive one I was ever involved with was $700k for a spot that ended up only airing once. What costs money is generally locations. More locations equal more days of shooting equals cash.

Cost of airing -- do you mean media cost or talent cost? Not sure what typical rates are for a network like NBC in prime time, but it shouldn't be hard to find a decent estimate via Google. But I can but a media person, too, if you want. Talent-wise, each principle talent receives a holding fee for a 13-week period. I think it's around $25k for every 13 weeks. Might scour the SAG site to see if they have actual rates posted.
 
Thanks for the help!

I don't need exact numbers. I just don't want to say it'll cost 5000$ for 2 weeks when in reality it's several times more than that.

Did a quick search and found some in depth stuff. Wow... just figured might as well ask the experts than to trust the strange world wide web, lol.
 
Jon Starr said:
Thanks for the help!

I don't need exact numbers. I just don't want to say it'll cost 5000$ for 2 weeks when in reality it's several times more than that.

Did a quick search and found some in depth stuff. Wow... just figured might as well ask the experts than to trust the strange world wide web, lol.
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PM me, I'll give you the real deal. We ran ads for "Wages of Sin" in some places. Local stations will give you a deal in the over nights but they won't show your ad if the film's not rated. We found ways around it.

-Nate
 
yeah, in all seriousness we have found the big hitch with the cost of TV ads to be the airtime more than production cost, at least for local spots. You can get it in certain areas of the Denver Metro in the middle of the night on HGTV for under 10 bucks for 30 seconds last I checked, but how much good does that do you?

For a real feel for airtime on a local ad, I would contact you local cable company and see what kind of packages you can get. If you get someone good, they will talk to you about your demographic, what channels and times that will work for, and how that will work within your budget (or at least they will try....). But the first question they ask is often "What's your budget?"
 
Jim Brennan said:
yeah, in all seriousness we have found the big hitch with the cost of TV ads to be the airtime more than production cost, at least for local spots. You can get it in certain areas of the Denver Metro in the middle of the night on HGTV for under 10 bucks for 30 seconds last I checked, but how much good does that do you?
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That was our problem too. Thank God the local channel turned us down, and made us seek other avenues.

-Nate
 
Jim Brennan said:
You can get it in certain areas of the Denver Metro in the middle of the night on HGTV for under 10 bucks for 30 seconds last I checked, but how much good does that do you?
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That's where ad agencies run their spec spots so they can enter them in contests.
 
Just so I contribute SOME useful info to this thread... locally a partner and I were supposed to have our own 30 minute slot on late Saturday mornings, for a green show that was going to be called Green Up Saint Louis.

We shot a bunch of stuff with Channel 11 that hasn't gone anywhere, and now it looks like Channel 11 is sold... what's funny is when we were first touring the studio we went up on the news area and a bunch of people were working behind there (like you see in some newscasts... and one lady asked "so are you guys getting the tour?"... and I replied "my partner and I are buying the station"... and you could have heard a pin drop! The whole place stared up at me in fear... it's really ironic that it ended up actually happening.

BUT... anyway... the point is that depending on the situation... commercials can be cheaper then you think... and some of these small markets will actually shoot your commercial for free if you run 'em for a month. The total cost is way less then I thought.

Our show was to cost about $7K per month... with the option to sell our own commercial slots and pocket the money. Basically we were buying a 30 minute slot.
 
MattinSTL said:
BUT... anyway... the point is that depending on the situation... commercials can be cheaper then you think... and some of these small markets will actually shoot your commercial for free if you run 'em for a month. The total cost is way less then I thought.
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The station I work at does something similar... we'll shoot it and air it X amount of times (generally decent slots) for Y dollars, with the option to pick up more slots (I think... different department so don't hold me to it).
 
Now we're back to "it depends."

You can get a spot done for almost any amount of money. Just depends on how you want it to end up. The problem is when you want something with a lot of production value and only have twenty bucks to spend. If your budget is low, concept around that. I did spots for $1,500 a pop once that ended up in AdWeek's Best of TV. Of course, we made them look like we spent at least $1750.
 
MattinSTL said:
Just so I contribute SOME useful info to this thread... locally a partner and I were supposed to have our own 30 minute slot on late Saturday mornings, for a green show that was going to be called Green Up Saint Louis.



Our show was to cost about $7K per month... with the option to sell our own commercial slots and pocket the money. Basically we were buying a 30 minute slot.
Click to expand...

Just to expand this a bit...

I was wondering about the math here, I assume your show would have about 6 minutes of ads per show. That's 24 minutes per month which translates to 48 ads (30 seconds each) per month. You'd need to charge about $150 per 30 second spot to break even on the $7,000 monthly air fee. To make any money you'd need to mark it up to around $400 per spot.

Are those the kind of numbers you were looking at? How hard would it be to hit those numbers?
 
Thanks guys, this is really helping.

However it's not myself doing this. Let me be more specific. Basically for this exercise we're taking the role of an advertising agency, and either taking on some big company as our client, or a new real company/product. So we're taking a really cool product that one of our partners wants to actually create, and we're pretending we have an unlimited budget and we're working out a huge marketing campaign for it. So to put together the budget we're putting together some of the huge numbers out there, pretending this start up company has the money that Rogers or Nike (or a smaller company) would have to run ads.

So right now the first project is putting together a proposal, with aims and goals and what we want to buy and budget and schedule, etc...

So I'm really looking for the big numbers, the big advertising slots, etc... The average price for big commercials was already mentioned (thanks!), but not for big prime time popular channel (like fox or nbc) airtime slots. I found some numbers online that I could use, but if anyone has any more specific numbers that would be really helpful.

Thanks guys! Teacher is going to love how in depth it is. He just told us to make things up if we needed to. But our group really wants to go in depth. :)
 
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