A lot of people rule TV out before they’ve looked into it, because they assume it costs a fortune. Some campaigns do, but there’s no single price for being on television, and most of what decides the cost comes down to a handful of choices about where your advert is shown and how it’s made.
New to TV advertising? Start here.
There are two budgets to think about, so we’ll take them one at a time. The first is the airtime, which is planned and bought through our media buying partners, and the second is the advert itself, which is the part we make.
Start with where your advert is seen
What you pay for airtime depends more than anything on how many people you’re reaching, so the first saving is to cover only the area you need. You don’t have to advertise to the whole country, because airtime can be bought by region, and if your customers are all in one part of the UK, you only pay to reach that part. For a regional business this is the single biggest saving there is.
If a whole region is still more than you need, you can go smaller. AdSmart from Sky lets you show your advert only to particular households, based on things like where they are and the type of household they are, and the broadcasters’ streaming services carry adverts that can be targeted in a similar way. If you’ve got a small catchment area or a very particular kind of customer, it means you’re not paying for viewers who could never buy from you, and because you’re buying a set number of showings, it’s easy to start with a modest budget and add to it once you can see it working.
The trade-off is that each household reached this way costs more than it would on ordinary regional television, because you’re paying for the precision, and it works out cheaper only because you’re buying so many fewer of them. Think of a furniture shop with one large showroom, where nearly all of the customers live within half an hour of it. A whole ITV region might take in several cities it’ll never sell a sofa to, so choosing the postcodes around the showroom would cost far less. With shops right across the region, the sums could easily come out the other way. We’ve written more about who AdSmart from Sky suits and about advertising by postcode.
Be flexible about when you’re on
Once you’ve settled where, the next saving is in when, because the same airtime costs different amounts at different times. The most expensive airtime is around the biggest programmes in the evening, because that’s when the most people are watching. Daytime and late-night airtime costs less, and if your customers are at home during the day, that might suit you perfectly well. There’s more to choosing a time than the price, and we’ve written separately about the best time of day to advertise.
The calendar works in the same way. Airtime is priced by supply and demand, so it tends to cost most in the autumn, when every retailer wants to be on screen before Christmas, and least in January, when plenty of people are watching and fewer businesses are advertising. If your trade isn’t tied to a season, moving the campaign to a cheaper month can get you a lot more airtime for the same money, and we’ve explained why the price moves through the year.
Nor do you have to be on air every week, because a budget that won’t stretch to a continuous campaign can still do a good job in shorter spells with gaps between them. There are often incentives for businesses that are new to television as well, and our media buying partners will know what’s on offer for a first campaign.
Think about the length
The length of the advert changes the price of airtime as well. The standard advert is 30 seconds, and shorter adverts cost less to put on air, although not quite in proportion to their length. A shorter advert has to work harder to get its point across, so this only makes sense if your message is a simple one, such as a sale date or a reminder of a name people already know, and ten seconds is a hard length in which to introduce a business nobody has heard of. The saving is nearly all on the airtime, too, because a shorter advert usually needs much the same shoot as a longer one.
Keeping the production cost down
That brings us to the second budget, which is the advert itself, and here the cost follows the idea, because every person on screen, every location and every extra day of filming adds to the bill.
The least expensive adverts are the ones that need no filming at all. If you already have good footage of your business, it can sometimes be turned into a TV advert with a new edit, graphics and a voiceover, and stock footage can work too. During lockdown we made a whole campaign for South Tyneside College without filming anything new, by taking stock video and giving it a superhero-themed graphic treatment and new messaging. Whether your own footage is up to the job depends on its quality and on who owns the rights to what’s in it, and we’ve written about what makes existing video usable on TV.
If you do need a shoot, keeping it simple makes a big difference, because one location and one day of filming costs far less than several of each. Using your own premises and your own people helps as well. The staff were the stars of the adverts we made for George Bolam Foods and Bell Truck and Van, both with the agency Dickinson Media, and both were shot in a day. It suited them for reasons that went beyond the budget, because George Bolam is very well known locally, and for Bell’s commercial customers it helps to know who they’ll be dealing with.
Those two adverts make a wider point, which is that a clever idea doesn’t have to be an expensive one. What matters is that people notice the advert and remember who it was for, and that comes from the thinking far more than from the size of the crew.
Where not to cut corners
The cheapest advert isn’t always the best value, and there are a few places where saving money ends up costing you more than it saves. The first is the advert itself, because your airtime budget is what puts the advert in front of people, but the advert is what they see when it gets there, and if it looks cheap or says nothing memorable, the money you’ve spent on airtime is wasted. Remember what it will be sitting beside, too, because even a campaign bought for a handful of postcodes appears in the same breaks as the national brands, and viewers don’t make allowances for the size of the budget.
The second is airtime that’s spread too thinly. There’s a level below which so few people see the advert, and so rarely, that it might as well not be running, and the answer is usually to cover a smaller area or a shorter period properly instead of a larger one faintly. The third is cheap airtime that your customers aren’t watching, whether that’s a time of day when they’re all at work or a month when nobody is thinking about what you sell.
So the aim is to spend the money where it makes a difference and save it where it doesn’t, which is a different thing from spending as little as possible. A useful guide is the 80:20 rule, which suggests putting around 80% of your budget into airtime and around 20% into the advert itself. On a small campaign the advert usually needs a bigger share than that, because there’s a limit to how little a good advert can be made for, however modest the airtime.
Starting small needn’t mean staying small, either. Boldon Bathrooms’ first TV advert was made on a tight production budget, and it did well enough that for the second, which we made with the agency SD Advertising, they were ready to put more into the production.
Want to know what it would cost for you?
Every business is different, so the quickest way to get a real figure is to tell us what you’re trying to achieve. We’ll give you a fixed price for making the advert before you commit to anything, and our media buying partners can get you real figures for the airtime in your own area. You can read more on our TV ad costs page, or ask us for a free storyboard and we’ll show you what your advert could look like. And if the budget is the main worry at the moment, there’s a separate piece on whether to keep advertising when money is tight.