I Do TV Advertising Too. Soon to Be Famous.

Posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008

So my friend/client runs a local shop that does window tinting and automobile paint protection. Nice little business. His biggest problem has been educating potential customers about the paint protection film (ppf) product. Basically letting them know it even exists.

His website ranks at the top of Google locally (of course, he has me behind it) and the window tinting acts to pull people in and exposes them to the PPF product. And a little spread by word of mouth. That alone is not enough. So we thought TV ads should do the trick.

The local TV network was offering to come up with the creative for an ad, no charge there, providing he bought the advertising space. Not a bad deal really. It is a small city so that is something the TV station needs to give away to sell local ad space.

Anyways, the ads they were coming up with, unfortunately were just not up to par and did nothing to really portray the product and educate customers. So I got to thinking. One night as I was about to fall asleep the idea popped into my head for a little story line that would make a great 30 second TV ad.

The Ad

The Process

I had sketched out a little story board. My girlfriend Kim is a writer and helped with the dialog. After presenting it to the TV station they said they would shoot and edit it but we would have to come up with the location and actors. No problem.

The local Nissan dealership lent us two new vehicles to use. A friend of a friend let us shoot on their driveway. We called around to the local theater groups and they got us in touch with a couple actors that fit our criteria. Cool. We rounded that all up in a week.

Day before shooting it turns out one of the actors didn’t quite fit the bill and we needed a stand in. ME!

So the guy who pulls up and asks “What’s Wrong?”, yeah, that’s Stever. I’m an actor now.

Talk to my agent about appearances and autographs please.

The Ad is Producing Results

The new ad has only been running for less than a week and already phone calls are coming in from people who had no idea about such a product. Yeah! Woot!

Notice I said phone calls. We purposely left out the phone number at the end of the ad and instead opted to just give the address, to let people know they just saw a local ad, and the web address. The phone calls are coming from people who went and checked out the website first. We figured that last couple seconds of an ad would make it difficult to recall a phone number but the domain name was simple enough to remember. The phone contact info is all there on the site.

We tried to tap into the emotional response and frustration of getting those first few rock chips on the front of a new car and let people know there is an effective way to prevent it. Seems like we nailed it.

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