Max Durovic, 19-year-old sign spinner and owner of Aarrow Advertising, gets the attention of La Jolla traffic as he artfully kicks, flips and tosses the Healthy Back Store sign.

Go after your target audience. An advertising campaign should be geared to your niche market. It is a common mistake to create generic ads that do not speak the language or grab the attention of your potential customers. For more information, read How to Identify and Reach Niche Markets for Your Business.

Highlight your competitive advantage. One of the keys to all advertising is to accentuate the pros of your company, those factors that give you your competitive edge. Too many ads are clever but fail to sell the benefits of the product or service.

Establish an image. You can recognize the McDonald’s arches while whizzing by on the highway. Likewise, there are plenty of products that you recognize by their packaging or logo. Image counts when it comes to advertising and promoting your business. Too many advertisers do not work to build a consistent image. Check out Three Brand Identity Myths That Will Bring Your Business Down for additional issues to avoid.

You have to spend money to make money. There are ways to save money, but typically advertising is not the place to cut corners. It will affect sales, and that affects the bottom line. Successful advertising may cost some money, but that is because it works. Check out More Bang for Your Advertising Buck for cost-cutting tips that won’t cut your goals.

Advertise in the right places. Your favorite magazine, radio station, or even television program might not be a favorite of your audience. Know what they read, watch, and listen to, and advertise in media that reaches your target market.

Don’t allow your budget to run your advertising campaign. If you budget $5,000 per month for advertising, you’ve made it very easy from a bookkeeping perspective. However, if like most businesses you have seasonal highs and lows, you are spending too much money advertising during down times and not enough when you want to attract customers. Too many entrepreneurs do not budget according to their seasonal advertising needs.

Diversify. It is all too common for business owners to choose the best place to advertise based on price and potential rate of returns and then stop. As is the case with investing, you do not want to put all of your eggs in one basket. Spread your advertising dollars around.

Don’t try to be everything to everyone. No product or service will appeal to everyone. Many business owners, including corporate executives, try to come up with ways to reach every market. Typically, this does not work. It can spell disaster for small businesses, who cannot afford to spread themselves too thin. Therefore, find your market and be everything you can be to that audience.

Test your ads in advance. If you have the time or money to invest in focus groups, you should test your ads on other people. Do they understand and accept the message that you are trying to convey? For further information, read Focus Groups: How They Can Work for Your Small Business. There are other less-expensive ways to test your ads as well: questionnaires, for example. The article Creating Questionnaires for Gathering Market Research can be helpful.

Monitor your ads. It is very easy to ask new customers or clients where they heard about you. As simple as this is, many entrepreneurs do not bother to do so. It is advantageous to know which ads generate business.

Appropriate For:
Any business with a product that’s best sold with a demonstration or explanation–especially a new product that needs an introduction to consumers

Typical Cost:
$20,000 to $250,000 on average, depending on the length of the infomercial, talent involved, location, product size and complexity, and many other factors of production

How It Works:
First, let’s all admit we’ve watched a few and move on. Maybe it was because we were too tired to change the channel or perhaps we were actually drawn in by the subject matter and didn’t realize the program was really an infomercial. While they used to be relegated to airing overnight, usually between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., they now also run during the day on the weekends, where the channel guide reads “Paid Programming.” A good clue that you’re watching an infomercial is that the commercials within the program advertise the same product!

There’s a lot to be said for being able to give a live demonstration of your product so that consumers can actually see how it works–how easy or difficult it is, how large or small, how sharp or dull, or how effective. This is a form of advertising you don’t want to attempt yourself. Hire a professional to guide you through this multi-faceted process. Even television stations aren’t set up to handle the making of an infomercial from beginning to end. They don’t have the capability to provide the set design, scripts, show format, celebrity acquisition and testimonials, just to name a few of the elements that go into the process. They can shoot the footage in the beginning and edit the whole thing together at the end, but everything in-between is out of their realm.

Most advertising agencies can help you with the production of your infomercial. They can be responsible for such pre-production details as budgeting, scouting locations, promotion and public relations, research, any construction needed, and much more. One solution is to hire an advertising agency to create the “pieces,” such as the testimonials, the set designs, the scripts and the talent, and then bring everything to the TV station to put it all together. Your television sales reps may also be able to recommend companies, such as Hawthorne Direct or Producers Direct in your vicinity that can handle your project from start to finish. To find a company in your area, run a Google search for “DRTV production companies.”

Your infomercial will seldom be watched by anyone from beginning to end, so you must break up the half-hour show into separate, interesting segments with a “closer” or “call to action” at the end of each segment. While your toll-free phone number, website URL and/or P.O. box address should stay on the screen at all times, a “closing” segment should take place every ten minutes or so to encourage people to buy immediately or to offer a list of store locations where the product can be found. Then move right on to a new segment.

Keep your messages moving. For instance, a car dealership may showcase its used cars in one segment, then move on to its service department, then present its new cars, then show testimonials. The idea is to keep the audiences interested without boring them to death and to keep the half-hour fluid.

Businesses with products that don’t change much over time can more easily recover the cost of making an infomercial because they can produce just one and use it for years. But the infomercials for some businesses have a much shorter shelf-life because the footage is constantly becoming outdated (the car dealership, for example). Owners of these type of businesses need to continually bear the cost of revising or creating entirely new productions year after year.

Infomercials take time to produce. For instance, if you want to include testimonials, you have to find the right people and, depending on the product, you may even have to travel to shoot footage of them. Multiply your travel costs by the number of testimonials you want to use in your infomercial, and you can see that just that portion can take a week or more. When all is said and done, you can probably add another week or more for selecting your music, editing the footage, and getting the copies (dubs) made for whatever stations you’ll be running it on.

When it comes to televising your infomercials, you’ll spend anywhere from $100 to $3,000 per spot, on average, to buy actual air time. Since most of these ads run overnight and on the weekends, the per-spot cost isn’t quite as high as it would be during any other time of the day or evening. It all ads up–it’s not territory for the faint of heart or the small of budget to explore. And because you won’t know if your infomercial is a good one–meaning one that works–until it actually airs, it only makes sense that you start with professionals who know the ins and outs of creating infomercials to give yourself the best chance of success. And for this reason, you’ll want to test your long commercial in a small market and not cast a wide net until you know if it’s working for you!

Although the industry’s reputation is improving, there are still infomercials that may make this form of advertising difficult to be associated with. Psychic readers, get-rich-quick schemes, and all those too-good-to-be-true infomercials where they say you can lose weight without any effort make it hard for others to be taken seriously. So be sure that if you use infomercials, you follow through with your fulfillment and return policies–and that your product or service lives up to what you promise your audience.

Appropriate For:
Businesses with a product that would benefit from demonstration and that have a big budget

Typical Cost:
$40,000 to $600,000 depending on the length, the format (film or standard or high-definition video), your location and whether you get celebrity talent, among other things

How It Works:
Direct response TV ads come in three formats: short-form ads that run 15, 30, 60, or 120 seconds in length, long-form ads, or infomercials that run 27:30 to 28:30 minutes in length, and live shopping opportunities on such channels as HSN and QVC. These commercials all use repetitive reinforcement to create demand by convincing consumers they want the products being shown or demonstrated and covert that demand into sales.

Short-form ads can fit into slots that aren’t always available to the long-form ads and are generally aired ROS (run of schedule or run of station), which means they’re not assigned specific slots at the time of purchase. Rather, they “float” throughout the day and/or night. Long-form ads run overnight in specific time slots, generally between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., and during the weekends where the program guide reads “Paid Programming” (see “Infomercial Ads” for more information). There are also some independent stations that offer long-form ads during daytime hours.

The long form of direct response TV ads gives marketers the benefit of time to demonstrate and explain their product or service. This is especially important for a new product coming to market or one that needs some explanation. Infomercials can help overcome anticipated consumer objections and build confidence in a product or service. Combining long and short-form direct TV ads can provide you with a favorable mix of placements–the shorter ads reinforce the content of the longer infomercials and serve to increase a consumer’s recall.

Unlike general TV advertising, direct response TV ads ask the consumer to take action right there and then–to make the call, grab the credit card, make the purchase–so it’s easy to tell immediately whether you’ve succeeded in putting together an ad that works or not. The response is immediate–or not. The effectiveness of direct response ads is measured based on response: whether it’s driven by cost per order, cost per lead, cost per call or some other criteria.

You’d be in way over your head if you tried to do something this sophisticated and complicated on your own (think what it would be like if you had to take out your own tonsils and then sew them back in again). And if you have the budget to consider this form of advertising, you have the budget to hire a professional direct response ad company like Hawthorne Direct Inc. to handle this form of advertising for you. Some of the details they carry out that you don’t want to fool with include:

Concept development

Marketing plans

Creative

Production

Media buying

Tape duplication

Telemarketing and fulfillment management

Home shopping

International distribution

Credit card syndication

Retail distribution

Just the details involved with setting up your own toll-free number should be enough to convince you to stay away from the rest of the process: After selecting a telemarketing company, scripts must be developed to maximize sales and leads–and scripts that aren’t working have to be rewritten. Someone needs to train the operators so that when they answer your toll-free phone number, they’re educated about you and your product, and they understand your offer (operators are provided with VHS copies of the actual show as part of their training). Operator calls have to be monitored to be sure they’re being handled professionally. And then there’s the whole process of tracking call volume during each telecast to be sure there are enough operators to handle the load. And that’s not even close to being the end of that one part of running a direct response ad.

You’ll purchase direct response TV ads on a market-to-market, station-to-station basis and they’re always in the process of being booked or canceled, changed or re-negotiated. In the best performing venues, the demand generally exceeds the amount of time available, so it’s best to have a company working for you that has developed solid relationships with the station contacts.

You need to understand that there’s always risk associated with direct response TV ads. If your infomercial test isn’t successful, for example, the show would need to be re-worked and retested until the necessary level of response is reached–and this can be very expensive.

There’s a wide variety of content out there today in the world of infomercials, and some of it falls into the “eye roll” category: psychic readers, get-rich-quick schemes, vibrating face masks, weight loss drugs, cure-it-all vitamins–the list is too long to ponder. Just remember, your mother was right: You’re judged by the company you keep. So if you choose this method of advertising, you’d better be sure you deliver on each and every promise you make so that you’re not added, in the minds of your customers, to the list of questionable infomercial brands out there.

Typical Cost:
$90 to $2,500 per commercial; $2 million to $3 million if you advertise during the Super Bowl! Rates vary greatly, so before setting a budget, contact your local rep for rates in your area.

How It Works:
Almost everyone would like to advertise on television. And really, it’s not so hard to buy TV schedules. Why? Because no matter what demographic your audience falls into, you can find appropriate programming on any one of the networks. Every station reaches every audience daily, with schedules that include cartoons, celebrity, talk, sports, soaps, news, movies, reality and prime time programs. Just take your pick!

Like all forms of advertising, there are different price ranges within the TV medium. Locally, you can pick up a 30-second commercial slot in a show like Oprah for an average of $90 to $300 (but check your local affiliate because prices fluctuate), or get into a noon to 4 p.m. soaps rotation with the same commercial for $150 to $300, again depending on your location and also the time of the year. You’ll pay anywhere from $200 to $1,500 per 30-second commercial for local news at noon, 5 to 6 p.m., 6 to 7 p.m., sometimes 10 p.m., and 11 p.m.; the most expensive time is usually 6 to 7 p.m. The best thing to do is check with your sales reps for a list of programs that fit your needs at the time you want to advertise. Nationally, you can expect to pay double the local rate. If you’re in a situation to be able to buy nationally, find a media buying service or an ad agency that will do your buying for you on a commission basis.

Prime-time commercials are going to be pricey even locally, but audiences can be huge for popular shows. And here’s an insider’s tip: When rerun time rolls around, refuse to pay the full price for your commercials in any time slot. Many reps won’t volunteer the lower rate–you have to let them know you won’t pay the same amount for reruns and then stick to your guns. Programming like Good Morning America, Today Show, local and national news, and soaps never have reruns and are always a good bet because the audience stays true all year long.

This is the one form of advertising that can include actual bidding when push comes to shove. When someone wants the time slot you’ve already purchased, they’ll offer more–and bump you out. You always have the opportunity to up the price you’re willing to pay, of course, but many businesses can’t afford to get into that kind of bidding war. When is that most likely to happen? The fourth quarter of the year is when lots of inventory is snatched up by holiday ads. And anytime a hot political race–either local or national–is going on, you can be sure the competition for time slots will increase. Unfortunately, these are also the times when small and midsized businesses really need coverage but get shut out.

While some large businesses are starting to use more 60-second commercials to try and cut through the clutter, the length of choice for most commercials is still 30 seconds. In most markets, you have the ability to run a combination of ads–that is, you can mix 10-second or 15-second ads in with your 30-second spots, which allows you to increase the number of times your ad is seen without the higher cost of paying for all 30-second ads. The reason it’s important to increase your frequency this way is because the number of times your current and potential customers see your ad is directly related to whether they react to it. But don’t think you can really increase your frequency if you run all your commercials in the shorter lengths, because they’re only meant to be reminders-they’re not long enough to provide the critical information a 30-second ad can hold. Their best use is to bolster your regular commercials and increase retention of your longer message.

What’s the best time to buy TV time? The first and second quarters of the year, with the first quarter being the best for negotiating discounts. Sales reps are scrambling to make their budgets when advertisers are trying to recover from their holiday expenditures. Deals will be made! Don’t hesitate to compare prices from station to station or among comparable programs. As long as you’re choosing programming that suits your audience, it doesn’t matter if your commercials are scattered over different networks. Negotiate your little heart out, and if you know you have the budget, go ahead and settle into an annual contract. This can mean running a certain amount of commercials every week or just agreeing to run a certain number of commercials during a 12-month period without having to know exactly when you’ll run them at the time you sign the contract.

Under normal circumstances, you’ll receive a 5 percent discount for signing a 6-month contract and a 10 percent discount for signing an annual contract, so don’t accept these as “big deals” when negotiating during the first quarter. You’ll get that consideration anytime.

Wondering how much to budget for a television advertising campaign? We cover the costs of advertising below — including cable television advertising prices and broadcast network television prices. More importantly, we teach you the best ways to do it on the cheap.

Making a Television Commercial – How Much Does It Cost?

If you ask somebody “What does it cost to make a television commercial?” you probably have heard that producing a single 30-second television commercial costs on average around $400,000. Maybe you heard that making a TV ad costs $250,000. Whatever. It’s a bunch of baloney. Producing a TV commercial doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. You can make a good TV commercial for a couple of thousand dollars. Shop around for an affordable advertising firm and you’ll find some really good deals on television ads.

To keep the costs of advertising on television within your budget, you can find stock video footage that can be repurposed for your commercials. Visit http://www.thoughtequity.com, for example, and you’ll see that there’s a growing industry of video clips for sale and they even have gone so far as to let you recycle old television commercials that have been used by other advertisers. Nice!

Another good site to look at is Click . You can purchase a pre-packaged ad from their ad library for less than $500. Spot Runner rewrites and records custom voice overs for any of its ads for $249. So, for less than $800 you can make a TV commercial!

It’s also a good idea to find a local video production company. Hiring an advertising agency will get you into higher dollar amounts for your TV ads, but a local video production company can do great work at very reasonable prices. We know one travel business in Chicago that gets its commercials done for $300. Of course, their TV commercials are very simple, but it works for them.

Running Television Commercials – How Much Does It Cost?

When we hear that a half-minute Super Bowl television commercial costs $2.4 million, it’s pretty intimidating. ABC, CBS and NBC book nearly $10 billion a year in TV ad revenues. National TV spots on the final summer “Survivor” episode sold for $1 million. National TV spots on “Millionaire” sold for $750,000. National TV spots on final “Seinfeld” sold for $2 million each. All these big numbers scare many small businesses away from advertising on TV.

In reality you can put together television advertising programs that reach your target markets for much less money than you might expect. For example, you can broadcast your commercial on local cable stations for about $50 per spot. Pricing is based on time of day, what shows your TV ad runs with, the size of the viewing audience and things like that — there’s also a fair bit of negotiation involved. Don’t forget that you also can choose how long your TV commercial is — there are 15-second TV spots, 30-second TV spots and 60-second TV spots.

With Spot Runner, mentioned above, they have a nice proprietary media planning engine that creates customized media plans. You can target customers by demographics, networks and specific neighborhoods. You can buy primetime ad space on major networks, local broadcast and cable channels such as CNN, Bravo, ESPN and HGTV. Depending on the market, the average cost per TV spot ranges from $13 to $63. Amazingly, you can reach 80,000 households more than 200 times for less than $10,000. That’s just over half a penny per impression!

National TV spots will cost more money. It’s not a bad idea to create a virtual national TV spot by hooking up with many local cable channels or advertising locally on national cable channels. But if you have to buy commercials on a national network, you can still get some good bargains on national TV spots. Just keep asking the sales rep this question: How can I advertise on TV for less money?

The Basics of Advertising on Television

Like all good marketing, it’s best if your national TV commercials communicate what you are offering and why it’s of value to the viewer. Be direct in describing what you do and let the television commercial reinforce your brand’s positioning and essence. Needless to say, it’s also great to include a call to action of some kind.

There’s an art to making a television commercial. Good television advertising combines action, motion and intrigue to attract attention and sustain interest. As you probably know if you watch television, the best television advertisements use a storytelling technique, both for entertainment value and to make a point. Before you run a television advertising campaign, run your commercials by some of your prospects and make sure that the ads are effective. No sense wasting money on TV ads that don’t work!

Don’t be stingy buying television time. Television advertising results aren’t immediate. If you run a single ad, you won’t see a boost in sales. After all, repetition is the mother of learning.

Good luck with your TV ad campaigns. If you pick up any good information on television advertising that you’d like to share with others, please send it our way. Thanks!

Tomorrow’s job applicants face a more stable environment but a highly competitive market. U.S. Department of Labor projections for the year 2000 suggest a growth of over 30% for marketing research analysts, advertising managers, and visual artists. Nevertheless, employers will continue to be highly selective. The most motivated, energetic, well-organized candidates with top-notch analytic and communication skills will land the best jobs.

Where to Find a Job

Advertising professionals find jobs in advertising agencies, in-house advertising agencies or departments of large companies, or with mass media as advertising sales representatives. Normally advertising agencies are divided into four departments: account services, media, research, and creative.

Careers in Advertising Agencies

Account Services Department:

• positions in account services: assistant account executive, account executive, senior account executive, accounts supervisor/accounts manager


• salary range for assistant account executives is $20,000-$40,000


• directs contact with the client; acts as liaison between art department, production   department, and client


• represents client’s needs to art and production departments


• provides interpretation support to client at presentations


• responsible for seeing that the client’s needs are met accurately and on time, which calls for closely following the in-house progress of the campaign

Account Services Department-Traffic:

• positions in traffic: account coordinator/traffic manager


• salary range for traffic manager is $18,000-$20,000


• coordinates all the jobs in progress and monitors their status to ensure that production remains on schedules and deadlines are met


• works with all departments throughout the advertising campaign

Account Services Department-Traffic:

• positions in traffic: account coordinator/traffic manager


• salary range for traffic manager is $18,000-$20,000


• coordinates all the jobs in progress and monitors their status to ensure that production remains on schedules and deadlines are met


• works with all departments throughout the advertising campaign

Media Services Department:

• positions in media: assistant media planner, media planner, media director, media manager


• salary range for assistant media planner is $15,000-$25,000


• applies statistical models to audience, circulation, and cost figures to minimize media cost and maximize media effectiveness


• manages the purchase and control of large blocks of media time/space, whether in print or broadcast


• recommends and allocates this space among clients according to campaign        requirements


• negotiates favorable billing terms for large, repeat, and/or guaranteed space purchases, which translates into more cost-effectiveness for clients and agency

Research Department:

• positions in research: research project director, research account executive, associate research director, advertising research director, research department manager


• salary range for research project director is $30,000-$55,000


• expert in statistical applications, mathematical modeling, project design, and     methodology


• works with and often obtains outside services


• monitors project to ensure accuracy and validity of findings, which are then reported and presented to the client

Creative Department-Art Direction:

• positions in art direction: assistant art director, junior art director, art director, senior art director
  
• salary range for assistant art director is $14,000-$18,000


• requires knowledge of advertising trends and strong visual communication skills


• develops and recommends artistic strategy and rendition for client campaign, often presenting several for client approval


• generates creative content for both print and broadcast


• often works with copywriter as a team to brainstorm visual and verbal content


• oversees progression of campaign from rough sketches through final production

Creative Department-Copywriting:

• positions in copywriting: junior copywriter, copywriter, senior copywriter, copy chief


• salary range for junior copywriter is $14,000-$18,000


• responsible for writing ad and promotional copy and developing concepts for     campaigns


• often works with art director as a team to brainstorm visual and verbal content


• requires knowledge of advertising trends and a strong writing ability

Creative Department-Production:

• positions in production: layout worker, graphic artist, production manager


• artists and layout workers create the visual impact of the ad by selecting photographs, drawing illustrations, choosing print size and type, and sketching scenes for commercials to go with the copy


• design packages and create logos, trademarks and symbols


• production manager oversees the actual printing of ads, filming of commercials, or recording of radio spots

There are a number of new departments that are being created within agencies to cover many new types of media. They include: 

Specialty Advertising Department:

• recommends and obtains imprinted merchandise appropriate to client campaign


• develops strategy and recommends items to be used


• obtains sources and monitors production to ensure timely arrival

Internet Advertising Department:

• develops visual and written content for client web pages, and/or on-line advertisements


• develops strategy for on-line promotions and web page development


• monitors web site and on-line traffic

Outdoor Advertising Department:

• develops content for outdoor/transit advertisements in adherence to client’s strategy


• obtains sources for production and monitors progress

Direct Response Advertising Department:

• develops content for direct response advertisements, such as direct mail and     infomercials, in adherence to client’s strategy


• obtains consumer information lists from client and/or outside sources


• monitors progress of direct response efforts

Typical Cost:
$8 to $2,000 per commercial, depending on your location, the number of commercials you buy and the stations you choose

How It Works:

When it comes to television, cable television is completely different from network television. While each network station offers a variety of programming that reaches many different audiences (news, soap operas, sports, cartoons and so on), cable television is more like radio, in that it delivers its audiences on a channel-by-channel rather than a program-by-program basis. Lifetime, ESPN, TNT, Food Network, MSNBC, TBS, LMN, and all the other cable TV stations each have a specific audience–all day long every day–that makes it easier for advertisers to purchase ads for their target markets.

When you’re on a budget, there’s a real advantage to buying cable TV ads–the stations can offer you targeted neighborhoods and eliminate areas that you don’t necessarily want or need covered. This is something that network television can never do for you. The large cable companies like Time Warner cover many areas, while cable companies like Adelphia “fill in the blanks” and cover smaller areas and neighborhoods for pennies per viewer.

When it’s time to select the areas you want covered by your ads, each cable company will provide you with a map that’s divided into sections, and from those sections, you choose the areas you want to buy ads in. This ability to pinpoint viewing areas is a huge help to budget-conscious business owners. And with a lower per-spot cost than you’ll find on the networks, you can afford to run a decent number of commercials, which is one of the big requirements of successful advertising–frequency! Your customers have to see your commercial to be able to react to it.

Although you usually buy cable on a channel-by-channel basis, you always have the option of pinpointing certain programs. And cable television’s a good place to look for specific programs that fit your audience for a reasonable cost. For instance, you can choose shows like Flip this House or Design on a Dime from the Home and Garden Television station and be sure you’re reaching the right audience–even if it’s not a huge audience, it’s the right one–if you sell home improvement items, lighting fixtures or furniture, or if you have an interior design or construction business. These niche programs make it easy to reach specific audiences because they focus very narrowly on the particular interests of the viewers.

Another advantage is that with such a large number of stations available, getting bumped from your cable television schedule is almost unheard of–an event that’s not so uncommon on network television. If you do get bumped, they’re almost sure to have open inventory on one or more of their stations that will reach your audience, even when it’s time for big sports playoffs, the holidays are creating a high demand for air time, or when politicians are eating up as much inventory as they possibly can.

Your local cable TV sales rep will be able to sell you any and all of the available channels that run in your area and package them together in a neat, little bundle at a discount rate, especially at the beginning of the year when they’re looking for annual contracts. There will even be special, first-quarter packages offered where you commit to run a certain number of commercials on various channels during the year for a small per-spot cost. Then, all year long, your commercial will pop up on the channels you’ve chosen. And you’re free to change your commercial anytime during the year to reflect your business’ sales or special events.

This company was built in 2008. and move in advertising, especially in TV and cable TV.

Our motto are Advertising says everyting. Hope that we can open the world with advertising.

I hope you all can enjoy this blog.