Are You Paying More Than You Should?

The last 4 weeks have been home to two major television sporting events – the Super Bowl and the Olympics. Here in the U.S., we glue ourselves to our TVs during the Super Bowl to see which spots are going to make us laugh hysterically or bring a tear to our eye. And this comes with a large price tag…in this year’s Super Bowl, NBC asked advertisers to lay out $5 million for a 30-second spot. For perspective, a 30-second spot during the PyeongChang Opening Ceremonies was a fraction of that, ranging from $544,865-$665,946 (viewership was down by about 3%).

But airtime is only one part of the cost equation – brands shell out big for production as well. Fortune Magazine recently reported that the average production cost for a Super Bowl ad was over $1 million, and, these days brands are “pulling out all the stops” by leveraging A-list Hollywood directors and actors.

Regardless of whether or not you’re spending $1M to produce a single spot or $5M for 30 seconds of air time, chances are you’d still like to drive out unnecessary costs and make the most of every dollar spent. While we’ve never met anyone who says, “I love paying more for things than I should,” many teams simply don’t have the internal resources and/or bandwidth to maximize efficiency opportunities. How do you stack up?

Ask Yourself These 5 Questions:

1. Do we have an internal production expert who can identify all cost drivers in a creative concept?
2. Do we have someone on our team who knows how to compare creative concepts to bids and identify which line items need to be adjusted?
3. Are we leveraging historical data for benchmarking?
4. Do we have an internal expert who can identify which overages we’re responsible for and negotiate them appropriately?
5. Are our teams comparing agency billing and vendor back-up against the estimate on a line-by-line basis?

If you answered yes to all 5, congratulations, you are doing well! Did you answer no to any (or all)? If so, don’t be too hard on yourselves…just know there are plenty of opportunities that lie ahead. To identify exactly what those opportunities are and find out the potential impact on your organization, schedule a complimentary consultation with one of our team members now!