How we made a TV ad for our seed stage startup. Part 1.
Where we make the ad 10x cheaper and 5x faster than normal
(TV icon designed by Elena Canton from the Noun Project)
A month ago when planning how to get the maximum number of sales during this holiday quarter the marketing guys at Lost My Name came up with a devilishly clever marketing concept— to do a TV ad.
To date, Lost My Name’s drivers of growth have used three classic internet startup techniques:
- Strong word of mouth referral driven by a high quality product.
- A concerted PR effort aimed at bloggers and other online influencers.
- Paid performance marketing on Facebook.
This has gotten us to where we are today, selling over 5000 books a day to customers all over the world.
But, given that we expect to sell more books in the run up to Christmas (Q4) than the other three quarters of the year put together, its vital that we explore every mechanism to tell as many people about the magic of Lost My Name as possible.
So our attention naturally turned to the granddaddy of mass marketing — TV. Our product has mass appeal, so we thought TV might just work. In the past, we’d had success using TV to spread the word after Lost My Name appeared on Dragons Den. You can read about the impact of that here.
On the other hand, doing a TV ad is expensive, risky and complex. And we didn’t have much time — once the decision was made we had just four weeks to get our Ad created, approved and playing on air.
As far as we know we’re the first pre-series A UK startup to do it, and the first children’s picture book to do it anywhere in the world. We thought it would be useful to share our experiences with people in the startup community in case they are thinking of doing it too.
In this post I’m going to explain the process behind shipping a TV ad in the UK. In the next piece I’ll explain what we did to prepare our website and operations to handle the increase in traffic and sales, and then finally I’ll conclude with a piece looking at the impact.
Step 1. Ask yourself if you can even afford it.
The first thing to point out, again, is that TV is expensive. Very expensive. Especially if you’re used to digital marketing. People in the industry talk about ‘The TV tax’, where you basically add a zero or two, or three on to everything you do.
“People in the industry talk about ‘The TV tax’, where you basically add a zero or two, or three on to everything you do”
Here are the things you have to pay for before you start getting any feedback on whether the TV ad is working to increase sales.
- Production. First you have to make your ad. This could literally cost you up to £1M, but more realistically you should expect to spend six figures and up. More on this below.
- Licensing. You have to spend lots more money on licensing sounds, images and the rights to use actors than you’d have to online.
- Compliance. There’s quite a bit of compliance to do, to get your ad approved for broadcast which costs time (=money) and there are various rules governing pay and conditions for TV crews.
- Buying the ad slots. This is the insanely expensive bit. Buying the airtime can cost you anything from a few hundred pounds to many thousands per 30 second slot.
All in, doing a TV campaign means six figure commitments, minimum. So you need to have the capital before you can even start thinking about whether TV will work for you — and you have to be prepared to spend it all before you get a definitive answer to the question of whether it works.
“All in, doing a TV campaign means six figure commitments, minimum”
Fortunately, at Lost My Name we had several tricks up our sleeve that meant we could reduce our costs and increase our speed dramatically — first, our founding team have worked in advertising for decades and secondly, we already had 80% of our raw footage shot from an online video we’d produced earlier in the year.
2. Ok. You can afford it and you think it might work. Now go and see a Media Agency.
Before you start working on the creative idea for your Ad and filming it you should go and speak to media agencies to help decide where to play your Ad and if your message will work on TV.
We used a London agency called GoodStuff.
They started by asking us who our customers are. We aim most of our current marketing campaigns at women aged 25–50 on Facebook so that was where we started with TV.
The agency then go away and come back with a schedule of shows that they think match our target audience and an expected budget.
We’d allocated £60k a week to spend on the media buy. GoodStuff told us that this gave us enough money to buy around 34 TVRs. A TVR is an inexact measure used by the industry to estimate the proportion of your target audience watching your show. One TVR is equal to 1% of your target audience.
This equated to around 400 plays of our ad on air.
It’s worth pointing out that 34 TVRs is tiny. For a bigger brand such as a drinks company, they’d go for 250 / 700 TVRs for a given ad. At the top end that would be more like a £1.2M spend.
We couldn’t afford that, and we couldn’t satisfy the demand if it worked. But more importantly, we didn’t know if our ad would work anyway, so we did a deal to buy one slice of 34TVRs over one week, with the option to purchase the same again twice over if we think it is working.
3. So you can afford it and you know where to play it. Now you need to write a Script.
All ads start with a script. For us this was quite easy to do. We decided to do a ‘Direct Response’ TV ad where we want customers to ‘take action’ from the ad and search for Lost My Name (as compared to just making people aware of the brand).
We basically want people watching the Ad to understand what Lost My Name is, how it works and how you buy it. In 30 seconds.
We already had a 90 second film running on the homepage of our site that we know increases conversion rates by 1–2%, so we decided we’d just re-work the script of this existing film.
Writing our script was made even easier because one of the co-founders of Lost My Name, David Cadji-Newby, has been writing TV Ad scripts for years so he did the first draft. We read it out and found it took 27 seconds. Bang on.
Also, fortunately we also had most the footage we needed because we had the rushes from the original shoot of our 90 second ad. Here’s the ad that plays on our site.
We asked an editor to make a rough cut of the 30 second version using the original footage, and then we tweaked the script and made a prototype of the new 30 second version of the ad.
This phase is normally called ‘pre-production’. Typically you’d pay an agency or producer around £50,000 for this — to come up with the creative idea, write the script, story board it, sign it off etc. We did it for around £1500.
4. Now check your script is legally allowed to be broadcast by sharing it with ClearCast
If you want to broadcast a TV ad in the UK you have to submit your script to ClearCast for approval. ClearCast are a consumer protection agency that stop advertisers making false claims or confusing consumers.
So before you shoot your ad you should submit your script to them to make sure it won’t get banned later on. It can take two weeks for ClearCast to review your script.
We took the decision to press on with production anyway, because we didn’t have time to wait for the OK — as mentioned, we have some experienced TV people at Lost My Name who made that call, but I would not advise it.
ClearCast took a look at our script and sent back some more information requests — they asked us to justify the claim that our book was ‘ a magical book like no other’. They also asked for claim justification around ‘specially printed for every child’ and ‘FREE delivery worldwide’.
They also required us to put info about when you have to order by to get your book by Christmas.
5. All legal? Now get your chequebook out and start making the Ad.
Normally at this stage you’d begin a second pre-production process to get the ad made, figuring out who will be your voice over artist, what locations you need to shoot at, what audio recording needs to be made, what props you need, who will be your actors etc etc.
But, at this stage, we already had original footage we were going to use of the kids enjoying their Lost My Name books, so we just had to re-shoot the product shots.
In addition, we had a special weapon — Steph — who runs a production company called We Are Reel that makes film content for digital ads. Steph was working for Lost My Name at the time helping to produce the international versions of our book, so we asked her to step in and produce the ad.
Normally a production company would charge around £80,000 a day for a one day shoot with 15 people on location shooting stuff.
We shot our new product shots at Steph’s house on 5K film and spent £4,420.
Once you’ve done your shoot you need to edit the raw footage. Typically a post production (post) company would charge around £25–50,000 to get the raw footage edited into an ad. This includes core editing of the footage, the application of colour grades over the footage to create the right effects, producing animation and so forth.
We spent £5754.20 on this.
You’ll also need a separate sound studio to record the voice over and music and background and mix it down into the ad. Most Post Production companies offer this service as well.
The price of this can vary enormously depending on the type of licenses you buy and the amount of music you use. It could cost you anything from £5,000 for a simple ad to £100,000 for an ad involving a celebrity or a famous band’s music.
We spent £4,850 on sound recording and licensing.
After you’ve done your initial ‘offline’ edit you take your raw material (film, the sound, the animation, the voice over) and you make what’s called an ‘online’ edit that puts all the pieces together. Now you can actually see what your ad is really going to look like.
P.S — At this stage you also have to resubmit the Offline edit back to ClearCast which takes a week. They check stuff like how long text is appearing on a screen (for example you have to make words of nine letters stay on the screen for 2.2 seconds).
The ClearCast Knowledge Base has lots of info on these kinds of requirements. Again, our experience making ads meant we were confident we’d get approved.
The final part of the editing process requires you to check the location of text on the screen to make it fit in the variously sized screens people watch TV on (14:9 action safe window). This is reminds me of some the of the responsive design practices used in web design.
In addition, every TV station has its own subtly different requirements for sound and picture quality so you have to render your ad out in various formats (e.g Sky is playing out in 4k right now). Again, the parallels with web design are interesting — this reminds me of browser testing.
Finally, you have to add these weird clock numbers and bits at the start and end of the ad to make sure the station can sync your ad for broadcast.
All in, we basically spent around £15,000 on getting our ad from concept to ready to go on the TV.
This is insanely cheap. It’s probably safe to say that the average ad costs ten times this to get to this stage, at £150,000.
So, you now have a good looking, legal, TV ad that can be broadcast.
Oops. No you don’t! You then have to resubmit the ‘online’ edit to ClearCast for a final approval. Wahey.
Ok, now you have an Ad.
Normally an agency would take 12 weeks to get from script to final delivery of an approved online edit. We did it in 2 and half weeks.
6. Still with us? Ok, now go to the bank, withdraw all your money, remortgage your house and sell your children so you can buy the airtime to broadcast your ad
Once we did that, we gave all the money to Good Stuff and they went to the TV stations with a wheelbarrow full of money and bought the slots.
You do need a media buying agency to do this. They basically have relationships with the various TV stations which means they can organise all the payments. They then send you a media schedule with a list of stations your ad is going on.
The final piece of the puzzle is to actually send your TV ad to the TV station. You can do this yourself using a service like AdStream. Or you can use a company to manage this for you.
We used The Traffic Bureau — they basically add extra value by following up and making sure everything is ok with the stations once they’ve received the ad.
Here’s our finished advert!
Conclusion: Making a TV Ad takes ages, is massively expensive and risky.
We could do it much cheaper and quicker than normal because we had experienced people who knew what they were doing. I’m afraid there’s probably no substitute for this.
We also managed the risk by reusing footage and buying a weeks worth of ads with the option to buy more.
Next up we’ll be writing about how to prepare your website for TV traffic and measure the impact, and then a concluding piece on the impact of our ads.
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