With Google, $1,300 could get your blog a national advertising campaign on TV, beginning the end of another middle man

SlateV made a television ad and distributed it through cable channels using Google TV Ads.

For about $1,300, the ad (see 3:01 point):

  1. Showed 7 times on Glenn Beck episodes
  2. Ran 54 times on four cable networks
  3. Picked up 1.3 million total views
  4. Generated more than 1,000 visitors to vcantellyouwhy.com, a site they set up to track the ad’s efficacy

Here is the ad and a description of its creation:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peqnSTBnTVk[/youtube]

As the narrator says at about 3:19, “The advertising industry won’t crumble overnight. But it’s easy to see that the barriers to entry have been lowered. And it might not be long before you’re promoting your blog or your punk band or your line of Christmas ornaments with an ad campaign on national TV.”

Yep, the Web again puts the tools of distribution into the hands of the people who need them, reducing the cost and inefficiency of using a middle man.

If you don’t have the time or skill to create your own ad, Google will find someone to do it in its ad creation marketplace. I see an opportunity here with the slow turnaround times of even the simplest ads; one firm needed 7 days to supply a roughly $500 montage of images with bad text.

Would it be possible, for example, to leverage your personal or business’s network to make an ad of satisfied customers? You know, Customer A does a short Web cam clip of saying how great your product is. Customer B repeats. So on and so forth.  To see how one band did just this for a music video, check out this post I wrote about it: To make your media masterpiece with the masses, divide projects into specific steps.

Of course, SlateV’s video about the process itself is an even better ad for the site than the one it made for national TV. That’s for a couple of reasons that demonstrate why “advertising” needs to become more like journalism:

  1. It does not overtly attempt to persuade; it respects my time and attempts to provide information; it is helping me, not (overtly) manipulating me; it is “how to,” not attempted hypnosis
  2. It is open to sharing and embedding; as a result, SlateV gets linked to from this blog

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