Preview the Lakeway.com TV Commercial
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
Geo web site commercial will start airing next week.
As I wrote about last month, I’m running cable TV commercials for my geo web site Lakeway.com. We’ve completed the first commercial, which you can watch below.
The commercials will run over 200 times each month across CNN, FoxNews, News 8 Austin, and A&E in the local area. The purpose of these ads is two fold. First, we want to drive more visitors to the web site. Second, we want to showcase some of our advertisers. To do this, we structured the ad with an introduction and closing dedicated to Lakeway.com. In the middle we highlighted three of our advertisers located in Lakeway. We will create multiple versions by swapping out the featured businesses.
We learned a lot creating the first commercial. I underestimated how much time we would have to show each business for. I think we can streamline that by grouping like businesses into each commercial. For example, if we show three restaurants we can introduce them all with one sentence, rather than three separate introductions for each type of business. For the first commercial we just used the first three businesses we could film in time.
With my understanding of the Lakeway, TX area, I think these commercials will grab the attention of the close-knit community. Already it has helped us sign up advertisers; we now have about a dozen advertisers on the site. As far as the effectiveness of the ads, I’ll have to report back on that in a month or two.
Related posts:
- Advertising Geo Web Sites on Cable TV
- Report Card: TV Advertising for Geo Web Sites
- GoDaddy.com Purchases Second Super Bowl Commercial
Tags: geo domain
Good Luck!
The Ad looks great – I really hope it works out for you.
Rob
Great job. And great to see the evolution of development into marketing. Did you know the main reason Coke advertises is not to reach drinkers but to convince distributors they are worth featured shelf spots? Similarly I think there’s great value to use this tool to recruit advertisers and whether anyone sees it on TV or not is irrelevant because pointing advertisers to it on YouTube is good enough to seal the deal.
Preview the Lakeway.com TV Commercial – http://tinyurl.com/ml3jhc
This is great, Andrew. Congratulations.
Suggestion: Find a better photo for your masthead (like we did for PalmSprings.com). It really makes a difference.
PS: Your masthead photo doesn’t look that bad on your site. For some reason it came out monochromatic in the commercial.
David, we did that so people would focus on the advertisers but create the visual of it being something you can find on Lakeway.com.
Great work Andrew…unlocking all aspects of development, marketing and of course a great domain!
Andrew,
The ad looks good and I acknowledge you for moving forward in your development of Lakeway.com with the use of off line advertising. I wish you great success.
Nice going Andrew. This will create awareness. Great angle including local businesses too. Fosters a community focus approach.
Very nice Andrew! In addition to building traffic I agree with Owen that the real immediate payoff will be having the commercial as a tool to sign on more advertisers. Like a snowball rolling down a hill the momentum should keep growing too. When other businesses see their competitors on Lakeway.com they will feel like they have to get onboard as well to keep the playing field even for themselves.
Nice job, Andrew.
However, I’d go with more push of all the content/info categories you have … including listing/stating as many product/service categories you can fit in; maybe rotate these in the various versions instead of specific advertisers.
The reason why (you’ll know if this is the case soon enough) is that I can see potential advertisers pressuring you to include them in the commercial(s) as well; possibly as a condition of advertising on Lakeway … which is no problem when you only have a few of them … but would become problematic as their numbers increase.
Well done Andrew! Very creative thinking indeed!
Do you mind giving us a ball park figure on how much it cost you to produce and run the ad across CNN and others?
Best
Robert.
@ Robert -
For a commercial that uses images instead of video, figure about $500-$750. For one that includes filming, it’s more like $1,000-$2,000. I got a good deal through a connection.
As for the commercials, it depends on the footprint. Figure about $20 CPM. But remember, on some channels in some zones only a small number of people are watching at any one time.
That’s very insightful Andrew! Thanks for sharing this information and good luck with your campaign.
I would be interested if you put a simple ROI calculation in 2 months.