Hello there Google Surfer. There are a variety of reasons you might have landed here, but I imagine the most common will be that you own or work for a company that wants to make an ad to help grow your business, and you are wondering what range of costs you can expect to pay to create a spot that you can use on YouTube, TV, Instagram, website, or wherever else you might take your service or product to market.

And, I imagine you have realized, like us, that unless you are shouting it from the rooftops so to speak (as I learned running my kids’ lemonade stand), no-one will know about you and buy from you.

So, here you are, looking for the range of costs associated with creating a beautiful TV ad. And since we have some experience quoting and working on ads, I think I can help!

These days there are so many different ways of advertising, such as:

1. A traditionally produced ad: created, scripted, storyboarded, designed, shot (with actors and a huge professional crew), edited, and put onto all the media you like
2. AI ads – a lot cheaper, but your viewers are sniffing out fake stuff and avoiding it these days
3. Documentary style ads: true storytelling with real customers, and passes the fake-test

We have experience with the 1. and 3.  Our storytelling documentary style ads (number 3) are generally very genuine and natural, and more and more viewers (and brands) are gravitating to this for a couple of reasons:

1. They are REAL. And customers relate to real human stories.
2. They are a lot cheaper to produce than traditional ads.

Since I don’t have any experience with 2, and because i think the hype around AI ads is somewhat overblown (I think there’ll be room for it always, but to truly connect with people real stories are better), I will go through the costs for numbers 1 and 3.

A Note On Location: This is for Calgary, Alberta

You might ask, why does location matter? Because costs differ by locality. For example, I have a really good pricing tool for these that works great in Calgary, because I know how much my subcontractors, with whom I’ve built relationships and so get good rates, will cost here in this city. Also permits and licences, actor fees, food (per diems), rentals, etc., all vary with location.  So, keep this in mind: if you were to ask me to price an ad for somewhere else, I can do it, but it will take some research.

Basically how I am going to do this is to share with you a recent quote we made, which was accepted by the agency as reasonable. The ad didn’t end up going ahead because they changed their plans, but it was more or less reasonable.

It’s not just the Production

Production is only part of it – you have to consider distribution costs as well. I don’t know too much about that, but it’s something to keep in mind. For example, it costs $8m to put a 30s ad in the Superbowl, but a lot less on a local station.  But you can assume most likely that the cost to use the ad will be more than the production.

Production and Estimate for A Traditional Scripted and Acted Ad

When running a business such as ours, we have to consider 2 things: our costs of goods sold, and our profits.  The profits go to things like paying salaries, advertising, networking, internal content creation, overhead, utilities. If we were to charge only our costs, we would quickly go out of business, and not be available to serve our customers. Our standard margins for small one-off shoots are usual 50%, that is, we keep 50% of revenue for profits, but since this was a much larger project with a lot bigger budgets, we lowered it to 33%, which apparently is quite standard in advertising.

What was the scope of the project

This project was to be a 60-90s  ad with 2-3 actors, shot over one day, in 3 different locations. The ad length is on the longer side, but this allows the customer to cut and paste it into different segments for different purposes.

Our crew was the following:

• Director
• Director of Photography
• Storyboarding conception, creation, polishing
• Production Coordinator – responsible for location research & scouting, casting research, hiring crew, making call sheets, managing the tech run
• Set Designer
• Costume Designer
• Camera Operator
• Focus Puller
• Sound Mixer
• Chief Lighting Technician
• Hair Stylist
• Makeup Artist

For a traditional production, this is pretty minimalist.  In film there are a lot of extra positions like assistant directors, screenwriters, art director, line producer, etc. But we can do a lot of that internally, so we kept it somewhat minimized.

How was the project going to work

• Pre-Production:
  • A lot goes into the ad before any shooting starts, such as:
    • Writing and revising the script
    • Conceptualizing each shot and creating the storyboard
    • Designing the lighting
    • Designing and sourcing the sets and location
    • Finding talent
  • Our total estimated pre-production costs were about $4,400+GST. This is probably on the low side for a fully produced and scripted ad such as this.
• Production
  • I can divide shoot day costs into two main categories
    • Behind the scenes crew & costs
      • Here we are talking about all the people on set to make it look great and to capture it, that’s costumers, hair and makeup, camera people, lighting, set designer, director, DoP, sound, etc., gear rentals, etc.
      • Costs for a 1day shoot in Calgary such as this
        • Cost: about $19,000+GST
    • Talent
      • The cost for talent varies WIDELY! Are you going through a union, or non-union? How much experience do they have? Are they famous?
      • For 2 actors and a full day we figured out it would cost between $2,250 and $5,300
• Post-Production
  • For this project we estimated about 18h of video and audio editing after the fact, plus some time for the directors and DoP to provide feedback and revisions.
  • Cost: $1,200+GST

Total Costs for a Traditionally produced 60-90s ad

So, having said all this, the total cost as we estimated it was about $29,450+GST.

Production & Estimate for A Locally Produced Documentary Style Ad

So, a traditional 60-90s ad is expensive to make. It seems like a lot of companies are turning to AI to create those now, and I can’t blame them.  Actors by definition are speaking a fake script, and aren’t actually the people that you think they are. So from a business’ perspective why not use AI? I can think of a variety of reasons (like, actors are still really a lot better at being genuine, warts and all, than AI can be). But what AI and traditional ads can’t replicate are genuine, real, personal reactions. That’s where documentary style ads come in. And they can be done with a much smaller budget than a traditional ad, making it more attainable for small businesses. We have noticed big brands doing these more and more too – sometimes with famous personalities.

Our documentary style ads have a much smaller crew, less pre-production, a bit more post-production, but rely on genuine actions and reactions from honest real users of the product or service. With our ability to pay attention to the details to make things look good, we can produce story videos that can serve as ads on a much lower budget.  Every hair will not be in place like in a produced ad, but people these days aren’t looking for perfect, they’re looking for real.

Crew

A crew for one of our ads is:

• Director/Lead Camera Operator/DoP
• 2nd Camera Operator
• Sound Technician

Optionally the customer can add in hair and makeup artists. We don’t need set designers, because we use real life places. Outfits are typically guided by us, but left primarily up to the subject.

How do we do this?

I’m going to write a much more detailed post some day on how to make a commercial video ad, but I can summarize here.

We are a small business that multi-tasks.  We also own all the equipment we need for these, and we do not feel justified in billing hundreds of dollars per day for a camera that will be used many times in a month. So we bring a lot of efficiencies to the process. Our margins for these are a bit higher than for a larger production, because we need to do a lot more of them to make ends meet (hire us to do 6 of these in a year and we can talk about savings – and yes, this can make sense and does happen occasionally). But even with that, costs are less.

Pre-Production

Preparation is still incredibly important.  We meet with our clients to collaborate on the story, subjects, messages, locations, questions to ask. We design the story in our minds ahead of time – and that helps a lot in our shoot because we know the shots that make sense.

Shoot day

Shoot days for one of these range from about 4 to 8 hours, with a crew of 3 usually (lead camera operator/director/DoP, 2nd camera operator, and sound technician). We often break it down into an interview segment, followed by a b-roll segment. We do it like that because many times we’ll get extra ideas for b-roll from the questions we ask in the interview.

We are very careful about the shots we take because the details matter. A poorly shot video with bad sound looks amateurish, and not what most businesses want. The point is to make something a lot better than a cell phone shot by the admin! With our experience capturing live event and real people, we respond quickly and efficiently to new situations, assessing lighting, composition, what’s in the frame, sound environment, lighting, weather, etc. It takes a lot of experience to do it well, but the results are worth it.

We also work with high end gear, to make sure the shots are crisp, clear, and cinematic looking.

Post-Production

Since there are 2 cameras, there’s more footage to go through, and it’s not just following an editing ‘recipe’ that a storyboard provides. So editing take a bit longer, anywhere from 22 to 42h.

What do you get

Our brand story documentary ads result in a moving 2m-5m story that can describe either your ideal customer – in the form of a real person – or the people behind the brand. It depends on what your objectives are. And one of the main benefits of such a shoot is that you will have a TONNE of footage that wasn’t from the main story that you can purpose and repurpose for ages – all content that will help your customer relate to you and your product.

The costs: $4,000+GST to about $13,000+GST.

Summary

We have noticed in the film and ad industry that things are changing. Brands do not want to always pay huge budgets for the older way of doing things. Those ways have their advantages, but with AI now, a lot of people are worried for their careers. Of course we will still produce an ad traditionally if someone asks us. It is pretty fun! And I can think of some amazing ads playing right now that are great because they are clever, the acting is awesome, and they are beautiful and well shot.  So while I think there’ll always be some work for traditional ad creation, audiences now can detect and are on the lookout for AI, and the power of a real story is always going to be effective. So a documentary style ad, shot the way we do it, can be an attainable way for a small business to create professional grade and impactful advertising material.