The 1,000 visits is pretty good at $1.3 CPC, but I bet it'd be a lot smaller for regular ads. This was the equivalent of a "click here' banner ad...you might get a click...but it's just people curious about what it is you have to sell.
Someone should do the same test for a regular ad, i.e. this is our product come buy it at oursite.com. I bet the number of hits will plummet.
Oh and I bet the production values matter a lot, their ad was actually good, anything a regular person comes up with, will probably be junk.(i.e. the equivalent of those dealership ads)
The cost of creating the ad should be included in the CPC calculation. Then, to limit it's impact on CPC, you have to run the ad a lot more so the production cost as a percentage of the CPC drops further. You need a lot of money for a decent TV campaign.
But I guess the point of the video was to show how easy it is to setup a TV campaign. In that regard it really seemed easy. It was surprising that it didn't require a large minimum to get air time.
If you are just targeting locally, say going into individual markets at a time. It can be surprisingly cheap to run a TV campaign.
You can go through the local network stations or the actual cable providers. Both will help you put together the ad (cheap if not free, quality depends on the idea, ie horrible car ads)
You can also pick your channels and general time frames that you want your ad to air in. So if you are targeting parents who own their home, you could select HGN, DIY, etc. and set the time frame to between 5 pm(afterwork) to 12 am(pre-sleep).
Same with radio in terms of dealing directly with the radio stations. You can write your copy, tell them you want one of the on air personalities to read it to some music. In a couple hours you can have a few different ads to choose from. It is surprisingly cheap to dominate any given radio station if you are in the right media market(not Boston or the likes).
When it comes to internet startups, the real problem with TV, Radio, or offline advertising in general is the bad conversion and lack of metrics like we are used to in the online world.
We are already used to single digit(or less) conversion rates for online advertising campaigns. You can imagine how much more that drops when your ads are reaching people who might not even be by a computer and are expecting them to remember your brand/product next time they are.
As for metrics, the easiest thing you can do is have control and variable zip codes. See how registration/purchases fair for zip codes outside of the market you are doing media buys in(but still relatively close geographically), compared to the rates for the area that you are advertising in.
The $100 mentioned is the minimum cost to get an ad on Google TV, not what Slate spent (though that doesn't mean the $1300 doesn't include the cost of the ad).
That's a good point. I didn't think the $1,300 could include the production cost of ad mostly because I figured creating the ad would be much grater. I can't begin to guess what it would cost to make the ad so maybe $1,300 did include production costs but I doubt it. I think they would make a point of mentioning that.
Someone should do the same test for a regular ad, i.e. this is our product come buy it at oursite.com. I bet the number of hits will plummet.
Oh and I bet the production values matter a lot, their ad was actually good, anything a regular person comes up with, will probably be junk.(i.e. the equivalent of those dealership ads)