Published on Friday, March 19th, 2010 by Stuart Thursby

Slate’s ad critic Seth Stevenson tried out a Google service which allows you to run your own commercial on national TV. Using Google’s TV Ads, based on the AdWords interface, Seth managed to buy some airtime for a homemade commercial on FOX News for a total outlay of $1300. The spot was played seven times, seen by 1.3 million people and resulted in over a thousand more hits to the promoted site.

As Seth says in the video, “the advertising industry won’t crumble overnight, but it’s easy to see that the barriers have been lowered.” Slotting itself nicely into the recent debate in the design world about logo competitions, spec work and a steady race to the floor when it comes to pricing, not to mention the debate about stock, this is just one more example of how previous pricing models which have sustained the creative business for decades are, if not collapsing, certainly showing some cracks.

While cheap budgets will, on the whole, beget cheap creative, particularly in TV media (whereas blogging and the like will likely only get better, drawing on what Ian Mackenzie wrote about last week), it’s not a huge step to ruminate on how small businesses might be able to effectively leverage this service.

If this kind of model does take off in the small business world, a niche may develop for freelancers and other “small time” creatives to offer quality, cheap TV production at a fraction of the cost of the bigger fish. Marketing budgets may be just big enough for small businesses to afford quality lower-end production when matched with the lower media buy costs of Google, and who knows, maybe there’s a chance for quality advertising to reach every step on the ladder.

Thoughts?

No Comments »