National Television Advertising Continues To Rise

I’m often asked how expensive it is to advertise on national television.

Ad Age Magazine is out with their top 10 most expensive programs for 2016 -2017 and once again football leads the way.

It will cost you $673,664 to advertise in Sunday Night Football on NBC, while CBS can place you in Thursday Night Football for $522,910.  Too expensive for you?  NBC has Thursday Night Football for a cool $485,695.

The most expensive non-sports program is FOX’s Empire for $437,100.  The Big Bang Theory rounds out the top 5 on CBS at $289,136.  All spots are 30 seconds in length.

Is it worth it to advertise on television?

It depends. Television is still an effective way to reach a large scale audience.  In the cast of The Big Bang Theory , the audience reach is in the 15.8 million range.  That’s about $18.29 per thousand impressions.  Put another way, that is just under 2 cents for each person that is exposed to your commercial. Could you reach that many people in a more effective way?

When you are spending advertising money, the best way to compare is the cost per thousand. That is, how much money does it cost to reach 1,000 potential customers.  Click Z has a handy calculator for finding a cost per thousand if you are not a math whiz.

One thing to consider is the audience that you are reaching in any advertising campaign.  If your target audience  is 45 year old females  and up, then an advertising campaign that reaches  18 year old males wouldn’t be a good buy — even if you got it at $1 a thousand.

Advertise on Television

For more on media buying, see my earlier blog post on frequency and reach.

Of course, that is national television and if your business only reaches people in a small area then advertising on a national scale should not be an option.