Rates on a 30 sec spot?

S

Shanky_Totobonky

New member
How much is reasonable to charge for a local commercial if the idea is simple, as in take less than two hours to shoot? And not much editing.

Thanks.
 
Re: Rates on a 30 sec spot?

You ask an open-ended question... for one thing, whose idea is it? If it's a brilliant idea, but simple to execute, do you get paid for your creative genius or just for your manual labor?

Reason I say this is, think back a few years to the Super Bowl during the great dot-com (pre- dot-bomb) advertising era. Remember it cost like $2,000,000 for airtime for one 30-second spot.

There was a lot of hype made about one particular commercial about "herding cats", and the company spent so much money on this spot, millions I think, and it had dozens or hundreds of computer-generated cats, etc... it really was a good-looking spot.

Then E*trade did a spot where they had a couple of guys sitting in their garage and a monkey got up on a bucket and did a little dance to "La Cucaracha" while the guys clapped along. Then E*trade slapped a screen up that said "Well, we just wasted $2 million. What are you doing with your money?"

Here we are a few years later, and I remember that the client for the monkey spot was E*Trade. Don't have a clue who the cat-herding spot was for. The monkey spot was by far the better and more effective commercial, even though it probably took them 1/100th the time to make the spot. If I was an advertiser, I would have paid more for the monkey spot than for the cat-herding spot and probably gotten better results.

So, if the intellectual property is valuable, you should be compensated.

If it's just a point 'n' shoot type of spot, with simple editing, then just determine an hourly rate and stick to it. Experienced shooters charge somewhere around $85 to $125/hr around here, editors charge $60 to $125/hr in many places... so two hours shooting, two hours editing, anywhere from $300 to $500 would probably be reasonable, depending on your experience and skills (plus any other costs, such as equipment rental, etc).
 
Re: Rates on a 30 sec spot?

Thanks for pointing that out. Much stuff to think about. This particular project is just a point and shoot sort of deal. Thanks so much, Barry.
 
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