Chilling Words for Commercial Actors: “They’re clean, they’re legible and they’re free.” – updated!
The CBS flagship station has an interesting new plan it’s deployed to win new advertisers. A story in Broadcasting & Cable says the station is doing spec spots for free and presenting them to prospects, and is winning new advertisers with the technique.
That sounds great, right? Then you get to the catch:
Brauer employs storyboards, a stash of about 9,000 graphic images, and a voiceover agency to create the commercials, and often goes along on sales calls. He says the spots may not win creative awards, but the typical viewer would never know they were produced at the station, not at a pricey agency. “They’re clean, they’re legible and they’re free,†he says.
Free?
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Update: We heard from someone who’s actually worked BTL on some of these commercials at a CBS station, and who had a different perspective:
So basically the station is eating the costs of producing the spots in order to keep the clients purchasing ad time on the station. I don’t think this is as dire as it reads and it certainly isn’t costing jobs. If anything, it’s created Union jobs just with the crew hires, and there is no guarantee that these commercials would have been shot Union if  (our station) wasn’t producing them. Â
I came away from this article with a completely different take.
A TV station, hurting for ad dollars, uses their in-house talent to develop animatics based on potential advertisers’ existing print and web ads. The raw ad content has already been created and approved (that’s a huge time/cost saver right there), so they are essentially just re-tooling the material for the TV medium. I think that’s a really creative and admirable move for these tough times.
Hell, Warner did this with the “Watchmen” comic book and sold it as a “motion comic” DVD.
WCBS uses a voice-over agency for the ads, so the voice talent is getting paid. What’s the problem here? Am I missing something?