How to Run a National TV Ad for $100 (VIDEO!)
I’ve always wondered how to buy a national TV ad spot. It’s been mostly impossible for small entrepreneurs to do so until now. But now Google is poised to shake up the TV advertising market and make it accessible to you and me. It looks exciting! And as much as I don’t want any one company to have a monopoly online, or over our media, this might be yet another reason to go long GOOG for the long term.
Check out Slate’s video!
(Transcript below.)
When we think about advertising, we often think about those huge campaigns that show up on prime time television. Campaigns for major brands can involve global advertising agencies and media buyers and can cost tens of million or even hundreds of millions dollars. But what if you could do it yourself?
A reader of my slate column on advertising wrote in to tell me about something called ‘Google TV Ads.’ It allows you to upload your own ad to the site and then buy airtime on various TV networks. So you can actually play your ad on TV. And you can do this all on your own laptop. It sounded almost too good to be true, so we decided we’d try it ourselves and see how it worked.
I have no particular product to sell, so we thought we’d just make an ad for slate itself. And since we figured this ad would only run in the wee hours of the night, we decided to make it a little bit surreal, vaguely, provocative to see what kind of response we could stir up.
Ad: “Have you noticed that the world is eating itself these days? Systems are disintegrating, there are drones in the sky, and, if you look closely, you’ll see there are drones all around you. Your mass media chases its own tail. The world is eating itself these days. And it seems like there’s no one who can tell you why. But the V can tell you why, the V can tell you why, the V can tell you why‚ [Vcantellyouwhy.com]“
As you can see, we created a separate website and put its URL up on the screen during the ad. That way we could see how many viewers saw the ad and the response that the ad got. Now anyone with a video camera can make an ad, maybe not as awesome as our ad, but you can make an ad. The hard part is actually putting it on TV. And Google is promising to let you do that straight from your own computer.
When you log into the ad site, it asks you to set a budget for your ad campaign and lets you pick different times of day that you want your ad to air, different networks on which you want your ad to show up on, even the specific show you want it to be on. So you can build out a specifically targeted media campaign from your own living room.
After we clicked around for a while, we learned that to our amazement for about $100 dollars, we could actually put our ad on a national cable network and reach 100,000 people. Of course, on our budget we couldn’t afford to put a 30-second spot on a prime time network sitcom or on a sporting event on ESPN. But we could afford to put our ad on during off-peak hours on a lot of different cable networks.
We were having fun with the ad, and it sort of plays to the paranoid fringe out there, so we were thinking of the best place to air and we came up with overnight reruns of the Glenn Beck show.
Even after making our media buy, we still weren’t totally convinced that our ad would actually show up on TV. But low and behold, there it was. Amazingly, our ad aired 7 times during Glenn Beck episodes, and, overall, it aired 54 different times on 4 different cable networks. 1.3 million people saw the ad, and of those, over 1,000 people actually typed in the URL displayed. And our total outlay was only 1,300 bucks.
The advertising industry won’t crumble overnight, but it’s easy to see that the barriers to entry have been lowered. And it might not be long until you’re promoting your blog, your punk band, or you line of Christmas ornaments on national television.
