Champagne Taste, Shoestring Budget: TV Ads on the Cheap

What happens when you think your TV commerical style says "premium brand," but everyone watching hears "discount furniture warehouse"?

In this no-BS episode, Ryan Chute teams up with Ad Wizards Mick Torbay and Chris Torbay to tackle one of advertising’s most expensive delusions: believing you can look like Budweiser on a budget better suited for Honest Al’s Used Cars.

From Apple’s minimalist “I’m a Mac” spots to Restoration Hardware’s six-figure polish, the crew pulls apart why cheap production isn’t just a bad look—it’s a bad signal. They reveal how “average” ads waste your money, when a low-budget look can actually work in your favor, and why your nephew with an iPhone isn’t the next Spielberg.

The boys trade war stories on blown budgets, laugh at the charm of terrible cable ads, and argue over whether you should spend until it hurts—or until your brand finally stops looking like a garage sale.

Episode Highlights

• Why most $10K ads are tragically average —and how to rise above them.
• When "cheap" is on-brand (and when it tanks your credibility).
• How to make budget restrictions fuel creativity instead of killing it.
• The hidden costs of cutting corners in casting, gear, and post-production.
• Real-world case studies: from plumbing ads to premium retail giants.

Whether you’re running a scrappy small business or managing a big-budget brand, this episode will sharpen your instincts, save you from wasting money, and help you invest in production that makes your ads look as good as you say you are.

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💬 When was the last time you saw a “budget-friendly” commercial that didn’t look like your cousin shot it on a weekend—and did you trust that brand more or less afterward?

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

In today's episode of Advertising in America, we're going to debate the high cost of TV production.

I love now. Now is the best. Everything is so much better now, and production is better too.

You need to spend enough to deliver a final product that looks professional, that delivers on your concept. If cutting corners compromises that, you can't cut those corners. Your goal is to look like an advertiser that people take seriously. If your production values look half-assed. You undermine that.

You can't just take any idea and try and pull it off on a shoestring. If it looks like you cut corners on production, people will think you cut corners everywhere else. Here's a commercial made on a low budget. But don't confuse Big Head Store with a high-end furniture store. Restoration Hardware spends six figures to make their commercials look good, and that's how they convince people they're a premium store. If cheap is not your brand, consider spending a bit more on TV production.

Ryan Chute: Is it worth paying the piper for premium work, or will the minimum viable product suffice to fight for all the bootstraps? Here's Mick.

Mick Torbay: There's a thing I like to say, and I've even said it a few times on this program I love now. Now is the best. Everything is so much better now, and production is better too.

I actually produce some of the radio commercials I write, and in my home studio, I have the equivalent of about half a million bucks worth of equipment, if I had bought it in the eighties. I have a multi-track recorder of a quality that didn't exist 30 years ago, even if Steely Dan wanted it. I have plugins that emulate the most expensive studio equipment in the world. I record on a Neumann U 87 microphone going into a manly Voxbox preamp. That's about 30 grand right there. Only, none of it is real. It's software and technology indistinguishable from the original. On the television side, I work with studios that have editing capabilities better than George Lucas had when he made Star Wars.

And I'm shooting 30-second TV commercials for a plumber in Milwaukee. Just amazing. So there's no question, production costs are at an all-time low. Enjoy it. But do remember lower production costs doesn't mean you can spend next to nothing and get something that looks as good as a Budweiser commercial. It doesn't level the playing field. It just means Bud spends half a million bucks on a 30 instead of a million, but you can't compete with that when you're spending 5K. The best way to pay less for production is to have a writer who understands the situation and looks at a low budget as a creative restriction.

Remember the Apple Ads from a few years ago. “Hi, I'm a Mac and I'm a PC.” They made 66 of those commercials over four years, so yeah, they couldn't afford to spend a quarter of a million bucks for each one like Apple normally did. It was all done on a white psych with little or no props. The dialogue did most of the heavy lifting, easy to light, easy to shoot. Looked like nothing else on TV. But if you noticed how many small businesses now do TV commercials with two people talking on a white seamless, it's no longer a distinctive thing. It's still cheap, but it's not interesting anymore. Low production value means you'll need above-average writing and above-average talent. The MAC versus PC ads had two top actors, like feature film actors, so be careful.

Keeping your budget low is not easy, but it's doable as long as everyone on the team is aware of the challenge. You can't just take any idea and try and pull it off on a shoestring. If it looks like you cut corners on production, people will think you cut corners everywhere else. Here's a commercial made with a low budget.

But don't confuse Big Head Store with a high-end furniture store. Restoration Hardware spends six figures to make their commercials look good, and that's how they convince people they're a premium store. If cheap is not your brand, consider spending a bit more on TV production.

And if you really want to trigger me, mention a production guy who quotes you a price on a TV commercial before they even see the script. Seriously, that happens. “How much for a TV commercial?” “Oh, we can do one for five grand.” Really? Imagine a construction company quoting to build your new house without even looking at the drawings.

That's what he sounds like to me. Anyone who tells you how much a commercial will cost before seeing the script is either full of shit or completely out of his depth. Avoid that guy like your life depends on it. Find a talented ad writer who looks at a small production budget as a creative challenge, and you could strike gold. It's happened before. It can happen to you.

Ryan Chute: I just love pitting you against the things you're so clearly for.

Mick Torbay: It's kind of mean, actually.

Ryan Chute: It's actually awesome to watch you dance. It's a beautiful thing. Maybe I'm the evil twin. Chris, you spent the national GDP of The Bahamas on a single ad before. What do you have to say?

Chris Torbay: How much should you pay for production? As much as you can afford. There are various rules of thumb. A classic is that you never spend more than 10 or 15% on production because you should spend most of your marketing budget on media, getting your message heard, not on making it.

That's fine, but it also breaks down when the numbers get low or high, for that matter. Just because a 30-second Super Bowl ad costs $8 million doesn't mean you should spend $1.2 million to make it. Some, apparently, try filling it full of celebrities and special effects when they haven't got a particularly good idea or a differentiating message. But how do you calculate that if you use non-traditional media, if you run YouTube or social media or play it at your trade show booth, your media cost might be zero. So what's 15% of that? You need to spend enough to deliver a final product that looks professional and delivers on your concept. If cutting corners compromises, that you can't cut those corners.

Your goal is to look like an advertiser that people take seriously. If your production values look half-assed, you undermine that. The truth is, we are spoiled. Now, the bar has been raised; even the simplest Kickstarter video has production values that look professional, and they have negative money. They actually go further into debt to make it look legitimate. They hire professionals. YouTubers and influencers have sophisticated lighting rigs and audio gear and edit their videos professionally, even when they're trying to look like normal people posting from their bedrooms. There's a reason we don't shoot this podcast on an iPhone in Ryan Chute's rec room.

Production values demonstrate professionalism. It shows we believe strongly enough in the things we say to present them in a way that looks credible and professional. Is there a cheaper way to do it? Yes, there is. Should we do it that way? No, we should not. The key is making sure all the money you spend goes onto the screen. Good gear, good cameraman, good audio production, actors, writers.

Hire somebody smart to give you a great idea. Can you get some kids straight out of community college with a communications diploma to write your ads? Sure. Don't spend the money. I'm expensive, but the money you spend will be on the screen. Where you stop spending is where it gets more expensive, but not visibly better. Extra money for celebrities for no good reason other than, “Hey, that's cool.” Fancy dinners and tons of people at the chute, staying in hotels and eating big meals that we bill to the job.

Corporations get themselves into this trap because the committee has to be there, and it costs money to send the marketing manager, the marketing director, and the VP marketing all to Hollywood for a week and eat at the Ivy every night.

In my big agency days, I was on tons of those jobs. That's how the big breweries end up spending $350,000 on a 30-second spot. Skip those expenses, but do pay for quality. We say this all the time in business: there's a difference between the lowest price and the best value. The Volvo might be the best value, even though it ain't cheap. You don't have to buy the Ferrari, but please don't buy the Trabant.

Ryan Chute: The Trabant 601 was a very reliable automobile. 499 ccs of fury that was. After the commercial break, we'll thoroughly investigate how to whole-ass your production work.

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Ryan Chute: I love how you both danced around the numbers. What does it look like in cold, hard cash?

Mick Torbay: I think where a lot of the problem comes from is that nobody wants to look the client in the eye and say no. Nobody ever wants to say, “Actually, maybe you can't afford this, and when it comes to television, sometimes you just can't afford it, no matter what your nephew says.”

If you're gonna make a commercial, we can't just pretend that there aren't people doing that really well on television today. And your commercial, you can't compare the amount you're gonna invest in production with the other guy who also sells grapple grommets. It's, it's no, you're right next to a Toyota commercial.

So if you look ridiculously cheap and shitty, and then the Toyota commercial comes next, you're fighting against them too. And so nobody wants to say, “This is TV. You really have to do this well. And so if you can't afford good production, no problem. Let's do radio where it's a lot cheaper to sound really freaking good.”

Chris Torbay: But even in radio, in all media, the problem is that when you say nobody wants to say no in all media, there is always somebody who can do it for less than that. Let's mention a number. As soon as you mention a number, if I ask you, is there a way of doing it cheaper than that? There's always a guy who could do it. And then when that guy gives you a number and you say, “Is there any way of doing it cheaper than that?” The answer is always “Yes, there is always a way cheaper.” And they're all making, I'm doing it cheaper commercials right now, and they're all making, but it's a straw that broke the camel's back argument at one point, do you say, “Okay, now it looks crap.”

It maybe only look incrementally crappier than the previous one, which only looked incrementally crappier than the one before that. But at some point it looks. Amateurish and embarrassing, and what are you gonna do with the money you saved, because now you just look bad.

Ryan Chute: These are absolutely astoundingly important things to talk about. Let's look at some of the fun facts here that will absolutely knock your socks off in a lot of ways. And one service business, this is US Small Business Administration, in 2024, small businesses are spending 5% to 12% of revenue on marketing production.

That's not the media spend, that's not the channel spend. That's not the management fees. When we're thinking about service businesses getting their message out, their revenue, based on percentage of revenue, it's not unheard of in the world of business, in services specifically, this is measured through census data, right? That you would spend 20% of your marketing budget.

Now we're talking home services, plumbers, everything else. As a rule, we're running somewhere between 3% and 12% for most of our clients. Some of the people who've ended up overspending a bit more because Google has spent more of their money this year, have dusted up to the edges of 13 to 15% to aggressively grow. But we're talking about fairly astounding levels of expenditure here.

I've seen production come in as low as $200-$250 for a video, and it is clearly not TV quality. There is just no way in the world that this is going to look good on TV. We have production houses that we've used that will do it for $1,000 to $1,500 a video if you do a bunch of videos together. And again, if you remember the old days of cable TV ads where the slick used car salesman is coming, asking, telling you to come on down to Honest Als, super amateur, and there's to some degree, the potential of charm is there. Not unlike Red House.

Mick Torbay: And might be on brand, right? If Honest Al is saying, I've got the cheapest Chevys in town and he's got a cheap ass commercial. That works, that's cool.

Chris Torbay: But if you're trying to sell a premium product, which any of our consumers, that's where our clients are.

Mick Torbay: It falls apart, because most of the clients that we work with are not pretending to be the cheapest solution in town. And if you're gonna expect your customer to pay more to hire you. You can't look like the cheap guy.

Ryan Chute: Absolutely. And we've seen generic ads in a box where the technician walks up to the front door, the clip of the truck parked in the perfect spot, and the handshake and the smile, and then the talk at the thermostat. And then the conversation over the kitchen counter, all of the generic nonsense, and they're paying $10,000 for that one time and use it as much as you want. And that includes everything. Is that a good deal? Absolutely.

That is the worst money you have ever spent on the guy, and we've actually had this happen, who immediately threw out that he could do something that we were doing for a client for, somewhere in the realm of half. And that they would come to him and they would do all of this stuff without even seeing the script. They had no idea how much we had to pay the actual guy who was the actor.

Chris Torbay: Exactly. And that's why I say that money is money that goes on the screen. You can read the ad yourself, or you can get your brother-in-law, who always wanted to be an actor. He can be the star. Or you can cast somebody who is a professional actor. Who's got that right gravitas, if it's supposed to be gravitas or has got that comedic ability, if it's supposed to be a funny spot, and that's money well spent, you've created a character. Think of campaigns that are out there where you go, I love that guy, when you know, you mentioned I'm a Mack, I'm a PC. Justin Long's got some charm to him, and I forget the name of the guy who played the PC, but he was a well-known comedic actor, and he played the Schmo really well. That was good money. Could you and I have read those? Sure. But they wouldn't have been as good. It was worth the money to pay for those two actors for it to land.

Ryan Chute: Content Marketing Institute did a research study and found that small businesses are wasting 26% of their advertising budget on ineffective production. And that really does hurt when you're a small business. Like, we're never going to recommend doing TV if it's out of production. We're also never going to recommend that if you're going to do it, have a standard so that you stand up against the Budweiser commercial on one side and the Apple commercial on the other side. Otherwise, you are wasting your money if you can't land that joke, if you can't get the thing done, and I don't care if it's in front of a white screen. If the copy is there, I'm all for it.

If there's nothing that the copy is going to do, that's going to stand it out past the white screen setup. Don't do the white screen right? Looking at the production cost for what it is, is astoundingly more beneficial.

So what are we seeing typically for people who are really just asking us what they want to know?

The Wyzowl Video Marketing Research Council in 2024 said $1,500 to $5,000 per minute is a fairly common video advertising production cost, not TV.

When it comes to TV, the average advertising production cost ranges from $1,500 to $10,000 per asset, which is usually 30 seconds, and that's done by the American Marketing Association.

Mick Torbay: Remember, that's the average. That means there's a lot that's way higher than that. There's clearly stuff that's being done that's lower than that, but understand, if you spend $10,000, you are average. You are not standing out. You are not. “Oh my God. What a great piece of video.” $10,000 gets you average. That is something to bear in mind when someone says, “Yeah, I can do that.”

Chris Torbay:  Because it’s based on Crazy Charlie's discount, car dealer. Like all those guys. Those are guys in that average as well.

Mick Torbay: And they're doing it for $400.

Chris Torbay: So do an average of all the ads that you remember, and like, and you find charming or interesting or that stay with you,

Mick Torbay: Like what you talk about at the water cooler. All of those were made for six figures.

Ryan Chute: And the super cringey Red House one absolutely fits for a discount furniture mart.

Mick Torbay: They're not pretending to be anything.

Chris Torbay:  But the other thing you may find out too, is like you may find out that it costs more than you think, right?

In Canada, we have the Loblaw's grocery store chain has a line of products called Noname, and they're all this yellow label with plain black print on them, whatever.

Mick Torbay: It's ugly on purpose.

Chris Torbay: They advertise on TV, they make them look cheap. They look like they're in a studio. You can actually see the lights. So but they probably spend a lot of money to make it look like it's a low-budget spot. And I can guarantee you that they hired top graphic designers to design that ugly ass logo. No logo, but that ugly ass layout design that goes on all those things. So those guys from Red House, they may be doing it for 10 bucks. They may also not be doing it for 10 bucks and trying really hard to make it look like it was, because it's on brand actually.

Ryan Chute: Absolutely. And there's other factors in production cost as well. The type of camera that's used. One of the studios that we often frequent uses some of the most state-of-the-art equipment, and they rent that equipment because it's so expensive to buy that camera, just that one camera. Not just the camera, but the lens for the camera and how it actually does the thing specifically.

Technology has absolutely advanced us so astoundingly forward and reduced cost dramatically, because we're not taking up a warehouse worth of space to have all of this studio space. We've often had meetings at Metalworks in Toronto, where they have just massive pieces of equipment that are incredibly costly, astoundingly accurate and high fidelity.

But we're really trying to recognize that, like you said, in your studio at home, you can knock out a radio commercial. It reminds me of Johnny Molson's creative that we had with a client where he talks about a helicopter coming in from Luxembourg and using the dynamite to blow at the back wall. And all of those things on the TV budget would've been somewhere in the realm of half a million to a million dollars. The helicopter from Luxembourg alone. But on radio, it costs the cost of the radio because we just created.

Mick Torbay: You can quote a radio commercial production before seeing the script.Because I challenge you to spend more than $5,000 on a radio commercial. And that’s when you get Harrison Ford to do it.

Ryan Chute: That's it. That's exactly it. So other costs include royalties and licenses. Real music or boxed music, right? If you have royalty-free music that everyone can use and that you're gonna recognize on 58 other things, you don't stand out anymore. And did you spend your money wisely?

Or do I spend the extra $600 to get proper production done? $2,000 for actual actors who have to land in time and enunciate and inflect all correctly to have that, that perfect southern drawl or Minnesota mom or whatever the case might be, that really hits it hard. All of these things cost money, flying them to locations, costs money, buying the royalties out so that there's no licensing where you're having to repurchase the copyrights or use them in different areas, all costs money. These people have rights that are doing this production as well. Heck, even with Dewey Jenkins, when they released Bobby to go to Hollywood, Dewey Jenkins paid him a hundred thousand dollars as a parting gift. And they announced it on an ad that he was actually letting them go, and then it hit the news. And of course they said, "Is it real?" And it was real. That's what he got. So these things add up, and they matter. But will it further your brand? That's the question of the day.

Chris Torbay: And that's where it comes down to. It is case by case, and the problem you get in is when somebody quotes a number. You just said a bunch of numbers, which may be appropriate for some things and may be completely inappropriate for others. I hate for somebody to hear $600 or $2,000 and then say that's how much the thing that you had just attributed to those actually costs, it depends, right? If you write a jingle and it has a choir in it, you gotta pay all the choristers. If you write a radio ad that has two people in it versus one that's got four. There are extra actors in there, and if they need to be comedic actors, and so you have to get good ones rather than just any old radio DJ reading the copy; it's gonna cost a little bit more. And this is the problem, we all have apocryphal stories. Everybody's got a friend who did a spot for $5,000.

Was that spot... I used to shoot corporate videos, and people would say, “I got a guy who did a corporate video, and we heard they were $5,000.”

And it's okay, you're a mining company and you want us to go 7,000 feet underground and shoot for a day. Was your friend's apocryphal corporate video that was done for $5,000, did it have those challenges? Did we have to go all the way to Sudbury? Did we have to get a crew underground?

Ryan Chute: You gotta pay extra just to go to Sudbury?

Chris Torbay: But no one ever asked that. They just get a price in their mind. And I guess that's going back to the very beginning, that's why we hesitate to say “what’s a number,” because until you know anything, the number is only misleading. We have to talk about the exact apples and oranges that we are dealing with here before. That's right. We can talk about the number.

Mick Torbay: And I think sometimes we get bogged down in the individual technology. Like, I know Apple released a TV commercial, which they proudly said was shot on an iPhone. And I believe they shot that thing on an iPhone. But what they didn't do is have another guy on an iPhone 20 feet back showing you the lighting rig because you can shoot things on an iPhone if you light the living hell out of it, and have a brilliant, super attractive model to be shot. And the whole thing's probably on a steadicam rig.

Chris Torbay: And post-production is color correcting. There was all of that stuff. There was all kinds of stuff done in post.

Ryan Chute: So there’s editing, right? And look, what we need to recognize is that this is all proportionate to your budget, that you decide on based on your business. We're not saying you have to spend this money when we're recommending something, and you don't have to feel compelled if you're doing it on your own to overspend or outspend. Some things are an investment, and you're paying for them like Kickstarter before you're even making money, and other times you're producing these things in line with what it costs to put out your brand in the best way.

Remember, the biggest thing that matters most is the words. The second biggest thing is the visuals and other aesthetics. The other languages of the mind that associate with those words. The thing is that we've proven that for decades on the radio, and we've proven that with Theatre of the Mind and how that leverages up. So, is it that we only wanna do radio or only TV or only social? Is there a different aesthetic for social than there is for TV? Absolutely, there is. All of these things are true, and they're all relevant to where you're at in your business today. It's your production should be a reflection of your current budget to play the game that can be played, within the confines of what we have to work with.

Mick Torbay: And it should be a reflection of how you see yourself in the marketplace. Like in the echelon of how you see yourself.

Ryan Chute: That's it. It's gotta match or wait until it does match or do a different thing to get to the next thing. There are lots of ways to approach this. There's more than one way to solve a problem. At the end of the day. We have to figure out what the problem is and what resources we have at our fingertips are from that. We can figure out what to do to make it all make sense.

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Ryan Chute: Where do we land on production costs? The truth is, there's no one-size-fits-all answer. Mick made great points about today's technology, and a tight budget doesn't mean that you can't create something absolutely amazing. And sometimes a clever idea and a little creativity can do more than a big budget ever could.

And Chris brought up an important reminder, too. Investing in quality can make a big difference. Especially when you want to build trust and look professional in proximity to the ads that are in either side of you.

If you're a small business operator. I get it. Every dollar counts.

The good news is you don't have to spend a fortune to make a great ad, but if you do have the budget, invest a bit more so you can add a polish that tells your audience that you mean business in relation to what you're trying to represent in the marketplace. A premium product, a premium solution, versus a low-cost, low-budget solution. The sweet spot is where your budget, your brand, and your goals all align. And whether you're spending $500 or $5,000, focus on making every dollar work every bit for you. We're here to help you figure it out. So don't be shy.

Reach out, and we'll help you make the most of what you've got to spend. Whether you work with us or not, we always want to give you help.

Until next time, keep it real and keep it clear. This is Advertising in America.

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Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends. Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover?

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