What I Learned by Spending $100,000 on TV Ads

Over the last month (4 weeks) I’ve been running television ads for my company, NP Digital, on CNBC and Bloomberg in the United States.

If you aren’t familiar with those channels, they are stock channels. And to get even more specific, my ads are running during the hours the stock market is open, from 9:30 am to 4 pm eastern standard time.

Now every once in a while, my ads run a bit before the market opens and even a bit after… but that’s roughly the time the ads air. And they only air Monday through Friday which are the days the stock market is open.

Before I dive into how the ads performed, let me give you a bit of background first…

My theory behind running TV ads

Online advertising is becoming expensive. Just look at Facebook and Google, it costs more to run an ad now than it did a year ago.

Google and YouTube went up by 108%
Facebook had up to an 89% increase, while the average CPM was $11
TikTok having a 92% increase and
Snapchat with “the lowest” at a 64% increase

So why not try something different…

In the ad agency world, people run ads for their clients, but no one really runs ads on TV for themselves (at least in the United States from what I can tell).

So our team decided to take the plunge and give it a chance.

We also felt that it could provide an ROI because as an ad agency we see tons of data. And for many of our customers we are seeing TV ads from a cost to acquire a customer to be a bit more expensive than Facebook ads, and a bit less expensive than Google ads.

Plus, we thought it would bring credibility. Because even though we have 450 employees globally and we operate globally… being 4 or so years old hurts. Mainly from the aspect of bigger brands work with bigger companies.

And even though we have large brands at our ad agency like Adobe or Western Union or Sofi… and we have won dozens of marketing awards for our work, we are still small compared to agencies like WPP that generate roughly $12 billion a year in revenue.

There’s a saying in the business world, you don’t get fired for hiring IBM. The same goes with hiring a big holding company brand like WPP, Dentsu, or Omnicom in the marketing world.

It’s slowly changing though as people care for results over anything else. Especially with marketing.

So my thought was running TV commercials for NP Digital would be great if it could drive leads PLUS help build our brand. Eventually, I want people to say “you don’t get fired for hiring NP Digital”.