New Client…wants it all

[Mark Suszko]

“Do it all ” to my mind also means arranging the time buys and the fulfillment (you know, taking the calls and processing and shipping the orders from viewers). You do that too?

Reading between the lines of your post it sounded for a second there like he may be talking spec or commission to you for making the spot, instead of paying you up front. I would advise caution if he proposes anything along the lines of “make the spot for free, and you’ll get a percentage of every sale we make”. I have never known a case where this was not a scam.

There may be some legit ones I don’t know about, but I’d be afraid of such a “deal”, which basically means you are out all the time and money and may never see any payback.

[Rick Dolishny]

Scam.

God, where was the Creative COW Business Forum 15 years ago?

—
Rick Dolishny
Discrete Editors COW Leader
http://www.thecreativeprocess.ca

[Brendan Coots]

Lenny Lieberman of Lieberman Productions has made a trillion dollars from this type of arrangement with Guthy Renker. GR pays cost to have the spots/infomercials developed, and Lieberman Prod. gets a cut of the profits.

Of course, this would only be a wise arrangement if the client is reasonably well established and (this is key) willing to pay the full costs of production + profit sharing RATHER THAN expecting a total spec.

Specs are scams 99% of the time, but there are some legitimate and very lucrative profit-sharing/partnership opportunities out there. Spotting the difference is the hard part…

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Steve Wargo]

[Chuck Obernesser] “He doesn’t want people selling coming to his stores he wants to refer them to us and handle it.”

I guess that I don’t understand this at all. Can you repost with complete, understandable sentances?

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .

[Chuck Obernesser]

Thanks all for the input thus far. Steve what I meant by no one coming to his stores is that he runs a car dealership and he does wants sales people coming to his store and asking for the sales manager and take up their when they should be trying to sell cars and not taking time talking about sponsorships or buy time on my station etc… He wants all that sent to us and we decide where best to place his ad budget. I hope that clarifies it a bit. As for payment, I believe we will have a set price for commercial production print ad etc…he was talking about pricing for the spot on TV and it’s ratings depending on what the demo is for that spot. But thanks for the advice on everyone’s part. I was really confused when he started asking me about all these different things but as I went back I think it started to sink in and made a bit more sense.

Thanks

Chuck
Obernesser Productions
http://www.obernesserproductions.com

[Mike Cohen]

It seems you should draft a client service agreement, which states what they get and for how much – preferred rates in other words. For example, 30 second spot, 1 week turnaround, costs X dollars. Specify how you will handle billing, such as monthly invoices with net 30 payment terms.
If you have this guy calling you up with last minute requests, you need to be able to bill him in a fair manner for both parties.

Do you or your partner have the ability to buy time on your local channels or cable system? You would have to know the lead time for getting a new ad in a rotation and let your client know the realities of such requests.

Do it all does not mean anything without a signed agreement stating what they get and what you get.

Now, I have a system I’d like to tell you about that is guaranteed to make you money. All I need from you is $500 and I’ll send you whatever….

Good Luck.
Mike

[Todd Terry]

Hi Chuck…

I agree, it was a little confusing at first, but it’s fairly clear and simple now… this guy simply wants you to serve as his advertising agency.

At minimum that would mean that you produce his spots, that you research the market, learn the market, establish a budget for him, determine how many GRP (gross ratings points) you want to try to hit for his shows, deal with all the media sales people, determine when and where his media buys take place, and place the commercials.

He would pay you for production, and he would pay you directly for the cost of the media placement. You would make your money from the production, and from the fact that although you are charging him the TV outlets’ standard rates the TV stations and/or cable companies will be giving you “agency rates” (usually 15% less) and you pocket the difference.

If he wants to take that a step up and have you serve as his full full service agency, it would be all those things and a few more… it could extend to fully concepting/writing and implementing everything about all his campagins, not just TV but into a lot of other areas as well: radio, web, outdoor, newspaper, fleet graphics, displays, logos, signage, events, etc.

I don’t know what your experience is, but although we don’t really “talk it up” we have and do continue to do a lot of automotive work… we regularly do about 15 different dealerships throughout the southeast right now (some really good, some really bad but hey, it pays the bills)… most of them do a new campaign every month but a few of them are less frequent than that. We try to steer away from the cheesy screamer stuff and attempt to class it up a bit when we can. For example we just created a campaign for a dealer with high-end products (BMW, Porsche, Land Rover, Jag, etc.) and these spots are very copy light and free of heavy offers, all shot in black and white with a classical music track…. it remains to be seen if they work, but the client is very happy.

That being said, automotive advertising often “is what it is,” and most of our car stuff would never “make the reel.” In fact, our regular reel only has a couple of very high-end car spots on it, we keep a completely separate specific “automotive reel” for potential car clients that want to see it.

One thing to remember with automotive clients is that sometimes the money is a little slow. That’s because much of automotive advertising is co-op… the dealer gets paid back a certain amount of his advertising cost (usually half) from the manufacturer (assuming you stick to all of the company’s nit-picky rules… BMW and Volvo are especially tough sticklers). So in those cases the dealers often try to wait until they get the co-op money in hand before they pay you. So often your net-30 invoice can turn into 60 or 90. And by the way, co-op generally applies only to what you spend on media placement and not on production… so there is often the struggle with car dealers who might have very big budgets (we’ve had dealers who have spent $100K a month on advertising) but still want to keep their actual production costs as low as possible since they have to foot all of that part of the bill. We usually try to convince them that it’s better to spend part of their money to air a better spot fewer and more targeted times, than to blow all of their money on media and wallpaper the airways with a bad spot. We try to get our dealer clients to dedicate about 20% or so of their budgets to production costs, and put the rest on the air.

Good luck!

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Steve Wargo]

[Mike Cohen] “I have a system I’d like to tell you about that is guaranteed to make you money. All I need from you is $500 and I’ll send you whatever.”

Mike,

Is cash OK?

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .

[Steve Wargo]

Todd

It’s too bad that all local dealers don’t take your advice. We have two Lexus shots on our reel and the rest are buried deep in the library.

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .

[Steve Wargo]

I had that discussion with a dealership many years ago and he informed me that “His type of customer is so stupid that you have to keep telling them over and over. It’s almost like you need to reach out and shake them, like when your kids are bad”. We don’t do any work for him. I can only imagine what would have happenned during the first payment dispute.

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .