Sunday, August 22, 2010

Huge Success for Building What Campaign!

What success, you ask? Well, this time they only fell short of their goal by 90%. By comparison with their other failures, that looks pretty good.

Dear Friends,
Thank you for helping us meet our target for the first week of the “BuildingWhat?” fundraising drive! We have $10,547 in the bank to air TV ads showing footage of Building 7 all over New York City. After expenses that’s enough to reach 100,000 people with 10 spots. Who wants to see enough raised for 500 spots? Every $750 we raise is enough for another spot to reach another 10,000 people, so please contribute generously and ask your friends to contribute too! Go to BuildingWhat.org.


Remember that they were hoping to get about $100,000 per week; seems to me that they missed the target by about $89,453. And note in particular that they seem to have had a lot of "expenses". Let's see, they raised $10,500, and it costs them $750 per ad, and they have enough to do 10 spots. Doesn't that indicate that their "expenses" were around $3,000? And what TV show could they be advertising on in New York City that they only reach 10,000 viewers?

5 Comments:

At 22 August, 2010 11:09, Blogger Unknown said...

Check this great post on truther opportunism.

The Most Obnoxious Thing on the Internet This Month
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/193722/83512

 
At 22 August, 2010 12:29, Blogger Triterope said...

Let's see, they raised $10,500, and it costs them $750 per ad, and they have enough to do 10 spots. Doesn't that indicate that their "expenses" were around $3,000?

To be fair, they also have to produce the commercial. That'll cost ya three grand, easy.

 
At 22 August, 2010 21:12, Blogger Michael Lewis said...

At an average cost of $750 per 30-second ad, and an average viewership of 10,000 people per ad, $500,000 minus expenses will allow for approximately 5.5 million individual views. The number of people who would see the ad at least once would be around 1 million.

I would desperately love to know where they're getting these estimates.

I would also love to know if any contributors have done the math yet. If they want to get 5.5 million impressions, ten thousand at a time, that's 550 runs. 550 * $750 per run is $412,500. Maybe I'm getting something wrong, but since when does a short non-profit ad campaign require $87,500 in "expenses"?

 
At 24 August, 2010 04:35, Blogger Triterope said...

I don't think they've done any research on this.

First, I doubt there's a TV station in NYC that reaches as few as 10,000 people. NYC has 7.5 million households; a rating of 0.1 (one tenth of one percent) would be 7,500 households. And a household is more than one person. We're talking overnight slots on low-quality that station you always channel-surf right past. And these days, most of those time slots are sold to infomercials.

Second, there's the small matter of demographics. Reaching 10,000 people is worthless; what matters is reaching X number of people who are likely to buy your product. The organizers of this event have given no sign that they understand this.

Third is the significant cost of producing the spot. You can't just pull out a Sony handycam and mail a VHS tape to the station. You need to rent specialized video, audio, and lighting equipment. You have to edit the film into the final commercial, which requires talent and specialized equipment. On-screen graphics have to be inserted. A professional voice over announcer needs to be hired. There may be rights issues for the footage they want to use.

The TV station can do all this for you. But they won't do it for free. Not for a measly $10,000 buy.

Again, this campaign has given no indication that they understand what is necessary to make this work.

 
At 24 August, 2010 04:56, Blogger PhilBiker said...

--Again, this campaign has given no indication that they understand what is necessary to make this work.--

Since when have twoofers indicated that they have any understanding about how ANYTHING in the real world works?

 

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