How a Splurge Can Give Your Retail TV Commercial Serious Creative Firepower

I’ll begin by stating the obvious: not everybody has the ad budget of a Fortune 500 company. But that doesn’t mean your creative can’t compete on a national level. You just have to make your production money work harder.

Should you opt for an animated logo treatment? Custom music track? Film instead of video? A big name talent? You DON’T have to use them all to give your commercial serious creative firepower. They key is knowing what to splurge on.

By spending your money on one or two pricier components, the rest of your commercial production is elevated to a new level. Here are some examples where one or two splurges gave the TV creative national-caliber impact without a national-caliber budget.

Here, the storefront footage already existed. All we did was resize it and add quotation marks, which was VERY inexpensive. However, we needed a special voice over talent to bring the commercial to life. We opted for Tom Sharpe, for his widely recognized voice and unique style of humor. He was the only expensive component (10 times the cost of your average voice over talent) but well worth the expense.

Here, the custom music track and the animated logo treatment were the most expensive items (about $7,000 combined). However, these elements were used again and again in future commercials keeping long-term production costs down while keeping production values up.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Production, TV advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.