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Giving away your product
Hi everybody, first time I’ve posted on this forum, but I read it regularly, and can’t think of a better source of advice for my situation.
I am a producer at a regional tv station in Europe. When I started here 6 years ago, all the commercials were made with lots of trouble, ie camera team, full production, editing etc etc. Then I came along, and introduced them to a new way to make content; Fast and dirty (but still good quality!) with AE and C4D etc.
I am also an experienced cameraman, but sometimes when a customer has a low budget, its easier to get a logo and a couple of pics, and make something cool in post-pro from them. This caused a small revolution in our production workflow, and everybody was happy.
Fast forward to now. Nearly every single spot we now produce is only composited picture material. And made for nothing (no-budget).
I have read here how you guys in cable tv stations in the states also produce spots for nix, and make the money from the air-time costs. I appreciate how this works as a purely economic principle. But in my opinion, it is absolutely ruining the market. Its not that I can (am allowed to)produce crap in an hour or so, the spots are still expected to be high quality. But finished in a half day etc.
The sales people always argue with me that “this is the market! We have to compete with radio – newspapers for the advertising money from companys! When a radio spot costs just 50 bucks to make, we cant say to a customer we make a spot for 1000! If we have to sell a spot for what its worth, we can all go home. Blah blah blah”
My argument back is that we are television, we have a greater audience than any local radio or newspaper. TV ads are more effective, and prostigious. The spots are more costly to make. My time costs money (I am well paid, dont worry), the software and hardware costs money, utility costs money etc stc… And I can with all honesty say, the spots are good. With what I have to work with, and the time I have, they are REALLY OK. You cant put them beside national spots with proper budgets of course, but for cable spots, put beside what other stations in the country make, they definately hold their own.
I think it is just lazy for the sales department to say “the market is so; the only way we can sell, is to be the cheapest.” If this was true, the streets wouldnt be full of mercs and audis.
So, who can give me a bit of advice on how to handle this situation?
What can I say to these sales people who have no idea or interest in how a spot is produced?
Its not like my job is in danger, its more of a moral dilemma. No other business gives away work or goods, why should we?
But all I hear is “its the market, its the market..”
If you have got this far, thanks for letting me rant…
SimonBTW, how much should I charge for a days work?*
*just kidding…
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25 Replies
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Hi, Simon.
I love stations that do horrible work for free. It enables me to justify my rates without having to say a word. I’ll say it again… I love horrible local spots that yield no profit for the check writer. Not unlike an ambulance chasing attorney, when I see an ineffective local spot, thats who I call that day. I explain why and how they have wasted money (they really don’t know until somebody tells them) then explain what I can do to help them and how much it will cost. They haggle sometimes. They pass sometimes. Other times, they know in an instant what I am saying is not a pitch but the truth and they respond accordingly… instantly creating an on-going relationship.
You’d be surprised at how many people still think advertising on local television is somehow beneficial in this ADD, tivo world. If somebody doesn’t hold them by the hand and explain they are paying for folks to pee, hit the fridge, or fast forward through their dollars, it just doesn’t dawn on them. Habitual behavior is often undetected until somebody points it out.
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Dude, you insult me!
The problem is, I do GOOD work for free. I always do my very best with what I have to work with. And thats the crux of the matter.
I feel like Im whoring myself. For free. -
“Dude, you insult me!”
Hi Simon,
Surely, I don’t think this was Grinner’s intent, but rather a general statement, that is true by the way, about the Low end of the local television commercial market and how to better sell your self in those markets.“I feel like I’m whoring myself. For free.”
The way I see it is that you are NOT “whoring” your self for free. as you said, you get paid very well. I am assuming here you are on salary? What you have to understand is that in the television ad business, the money is NOT made in production, but rather in the sales of air time. So your company most likely makes a killing selling the air time with enough money to “pay you very well” to produce the spots for them. Even though they may not charge a premium for it, they more than make up for it with the revenue brought in from the time buys. They make money, you get paid a great salary and the client gets a “good solid” advertisement that is more than adequate for a regional market. This to me is how everybody wins. If you were forced to shovel *crap* out the door on a daily basis and were paid a pittance for your services, then I would see a problem.
Bottom line, if your getting paid very well to do a job you love, again, assuming here, then it’s all good. We all want big budgets so we can really sink our teeth in to a cool project! But there is value to your employer in you doing solid work on a quick turn around so they in turn can go out and make money.
Just another perspective, I hope it helps.
Good luck!
Richard Cooper
FrostLine Productions, LLC
Anchorage, Alaska
http://www.frostlineproductions.com -
Hi Richard, and thanks for your reply.
I do see your point. As I stated in my post, I understand the economics. But the fact is that there is no perspective on the cost vs. quality. I shudder at the thought of 2 of my customers meeting and one saying “I got a great spot, and it cost me 2500 to produce” and the next saying “mine cost 999, including air-time.” There are a hundred ways to give a customer a good, nay GREAT deal on TV advertising, without saying “We produce for free.” You will never ever get a cent more out of that customer for production again. And like I said, these are not crappy throw-away spots. They (customers and employer) understandably want a high standard of work. And this is my problem. The spots that cost quite a bit of money (relative to a small business) must look as good as a spot made for “air-time” money. Sometimes I get a clean PDF file, with good vectors that I can easily pull apart and do something with. 2 hours work, and theres your spot. Then next I get a CD full with 30 small low quality jpegs, and must redraw the logo from scratch etc etc, and it takes 2 days. Like I said before, they have no understanding of the process. And they want none.
Im certainly not being snarky, or not appreciating my job or salary. But really, what other business gives away work like this? Im being “Grinded” from my own sales dept. -
[Simon Roughan] “TV ads are more effective, and prostigious. The spots are more costly to make.”
I can think of two reasons to spend more time and money producing the spots: (1) you can prove that a better, more expensive spot will provide greater lift and greater ROI than the cheaper spot, and (2) a poorer, cheaper spot would be mis-aligned with the client’s brand or marketing strategy.
Some clients may be interested in spending more to protect their branding even if the ROI is lower, but most local ad buyers won’t.
Remember that many of your clients don’t care about advertising, production value, reach, or even branding. They are buying money. They give your station money to spread the word about their business, and they hope that their profits on the incremental sales the advertising can generate will more than offset its cost. For many local ad clients, all that matters is how much they have to spend and how much it will put back in their pockets. The spot itself is often secondary. (Gauging from local commercials in my area, some clients only care about getting their kids or grandkids on TV, and their actual products are secondary!)
I’d be very curious to see how production quality actually affects lift and ROI. You’d need to partner with your clients and do some experimentation to see if your station can really provide a better (and more profitable for you) product that will get your clients better (and more cost-effective for them) results.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Thanks Walter,
all good points to mull over.
Id love to get a crack at the customer at the selling point. My company is very compartment-alised(huh?) and Im told staight out that s not my job. Also, at work Im not speaking my first language.
I have in the last year produced a couple of big budget spots, with good results in respect of technical quality, storyline and customer satisfaction. But it is very hard for a company to measure any kind of bump in sales, without some kind of direct feedback like a phone number. One of these spots was for a well known local soft drink, another a Utility company. Both hard to measure in that respect.
Thanks again for your feedback. -
[Simon Roughan] “But it is very hard for a company to measure any kind of bump in sales, without some kind of direct feedback like a phone number.”
Absolutely — gathering the data necessary to correlate sales with advertising is very difficult!
There’s a famous quote attributed to department store and advertising pioneer John Wanamaker sometime around 1900: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Dude, you insult me!
Stop it. You insult yourself by whoring for free. That’s not a whore, that’s a willing slut. Lots of sluts are awesome at what they do, man, and lots of dudes dig it. It can make you downright popular. Stop acting like a victim when you happily hop in line for abuse.
Man up.
Stick your chest out at state your rate.
See what happens. -
Oh, man! You rock 🙂
>> Not unlike an ambulance chasing attorney, when I see an ineffective local spot, thats who I call that day. I explain why and how they have wasted money (they really don’t know until somebody tells them) then explain what I can do to help them and how much it will cost. << And I really dig this approach- mind if I steal it? --------------------- http://www.patrickortman.com
Web and Video Design -
Simon, you have two issues here, it seems to me
First off, your internal problem of the “grinder” being your own sales department. You can handle this two ways that I can think of. Ask if you can sit in on the client meetings and silently “take notes”. Do this enough times and you can get a rapport with the sales staff about where they are over-promising or being unrealistic. You might also get some ideas you can pass along to the salesperson, to steer the production process into something that suits your needs as well as the sales and client needs, or to find more economical ways of “templating” certain projects. One such pitch to try is the “added value” pitch of hosting their spots on the web, on youtube. Cheap to do; costs just the encoding time, after the master spot is done. They in turn can add this to their newspaper and radio campaigns and web site. Youtube doesn’t limit you to 30-seconds so you could do a “Director’s Cut” of the spot, and let your muse run wild. If they like this, think about how you can extend this and make it something they can take to say, an annual trade show or meeting. Now you are “upselling” additional billable services, and that is always of interest to sales and management.
You could address your concerns about “grinding” to your manager, in a positive way. Expressing that you think you could do much more, if you had the chance, with some examples. Frankly I don’t think this route has much hope, not in the market niche where you live. You are there because they haven’t yet perfected a computer program that generates spots without human aid, and the day they do is your last day there. They don’t see you as a creative partner, but as a technician, a needed expense, at this scale of operation. Your work is what they term a “sunk cost”, not unlike the cost of a recording deck. But not as a potential revenue maker. The TIME BUY is the revenue maker.
The other thing I want to respond to is this idea proposed by another poster of contacting clients that you see have aired bad spots, to tell them what they’re doing wrong and that you can fix it. I did this last year with a local ceramics shop that advertised on the local cable. Spot was so awful that I finally lost my mind and gave them a piece of it. Gave them a concise explanation of about ten reasons why the spot was ineffective, and how I would do it differently/better. Didn’t get any response back. I didn’t really expect to, but I had nothing to lose by trying. Frankly, most clients you contact this way would be insulted, I think, but as I said, I actually had such low expectations for this client, I felt it worth a risk to reach out. YOU, Simon, however, cannot do this; going around your employer to “educate” the customer will only get you fired, maybe locally blackballed as well.
The thing is, cable spots are all about the production being subsidized by the time buy, and Simon, you know this already. This is why cable co’s especially like their local spots to be what we call “no-shoot” spots, all made by compositing some stills together with some canned animations and flashy fonts. That is very cost-effective, (for the cable company) and you know, every once in a while, somebody talented and imaginative actually makes something quite good and pretty that way. But it doesn’t really matter if they do.
The fact is that though I could easily write and make a better spot for the ceramics shop, where are they still going to put the spot up? Yes, the local cable TV station. So I’m at a huge disadvantage, telling the shop owner that they have to pay more than they already are, on top of the existing ad buy for an ad that already runs on the cable. My fee to do a better ceramics spot would have to be a grand or two for me to bother with the hassles, and deliver the better quality I promised. Meanwhile, the time buy with “free” production included may be that amount, or less. To them, I’m just another middle-man with a hand out, asking for money. Double the money. For a spot that will be seen by relatively few people.
The value proposition of the spot being actually GOOD falls on deaf ears with most of these clients, because they are very small businesses and fifty dollars more spent per spot in the name of “quality” would be outside their margins. Of all the places that advertise on local cable, your best bet for making this special appeal to quality and effective production would be credit unions, community colleges, and local hospitals. They alone of the local businesses have enough extra money to throw at the production for creativity and production value, plus they crave a higher status and profile in multiple communities served by the cable co and they have internal marketing staffs who’s vanity and professional validation can be appealed to by promising a product worthy of winning some local or regional award.
Simon, you are not going to get your Maslovian Hierarchy satisfied, working at that place. Come to terms with that. It is a steady check, and a place to occasionally experiment, somewhere in the margins. But it was not designed for what you really want to do. Your artistic fulfillment, and the proof of your worth as a creative in your own right, are going to have to come from some projects outside of the weekday job. These could maybe be commercials for clients outside of your immediate market, that don’t compete with the day job. Or it more likely would be another entire genre’ of video work, where you are your own boss. Web videos on various topics, for example. I suggest this so often I sound like a stuck recording, but try to find a charitable cause you believe in, and concentrate your creativity on helping them, by making some free spots “on spec”. Do this in your weekend off hours at home, completely apart from the office. Unleash your frustrated muse on a potential client who could appreciate it and use it. It might lead to paying gigs where you are the boss of what is good, and to networking new contacts. It becomes work you are proud to put in your reel and portfolio. You may find that the experience also makes you a better editor day-to-day, by giving you variety of experience.
Then the daily grind at the shop will not burn as badly, because you’ll have the spare creative outlet.
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