154,748 pairs of eyes + 50 cents = advertising
Why wouldn’t any business owner want the opportunity to place their brand in front of 154,748 pairs of eyes.
In essence, they are all potential customers.
It’s true that most of them might not be, depending on your business. But even when marketing to a specific market, you can’t always know who is and who is not a prospect. I believe the marketing term is “fudge factor”.
That’s especially true in voice-over.
Video producers, ad agency commercial producers, small business owners and probably about 50-75 other jobs titles make up the voice talent’s target audience. If you were to run some numbers on the cost of print, radio or on-line advertising to all of them, I’m not sure whether you’d feel more faint or nauseous but I’m pretty sure we can agree you couldn’t really afford it.
So where does the 50 cents come in?
Between the cost of a stamp, a piece of letterhead and logoed envelope, I reckon that’s the cost to mail a press release to a local newspaper touting your latest project.
And if the circulation numbers from Wikipedia are correct for my city’s local paper (and I have no idea if they are), 154,748 pairs of eyes represents the total number who will see my press release in my paper if they print it.
No, they won’t likely see the whole thing, maybe just a part of the release that an editor sees fit to print, but it will be out there.
Will all of the readers see it? Nope. How many will read it? Wanna guess with me?
Let’s say that circulation number is overblown by 50% and that actually only 77,374 people read the paper daily.
Of all those people, about 1/2 (or 38,687) read the business section where a voice over press release might get printed.
Of that, let’s say only 1/2 of them read the little press release blurb section that newspapers run (in my paper, it’s called “On The Record”).
That would mean that 19,343 and a 1/2 people in Western New York would read my press release if the Buffalo News printed it in its paper (not counting the on line version of the paper – which most cities now have).
So to get all those readers, all those pairs of eyes – none of whom I am guaranteed will be a target audience for me – I have to invest about an hour’s worth of time writing a press release, printing it and mailing it to the paper. Costing me in real hard dollars about 50 cents (ignoring my hourly fee – let’s say I did it on my lunch hour, N/C)
Will the newspaper print the press release?
YOU will never know unless you write it, print it and mail it in.
I’m curious, what would a voiceover press release say, before it crosses over into a general ad? Also, many newspapers accept press releases by fax and email, saving you the price of the stamp.
melissakate.net
Several years ago I submitted an article and numerous photographs to a magazine, hoping that its publication would help drive sales of a newly released DVD, that I’d co-produced and narrated–a 78-minute video on the history of our region. I could have purchased advertising in this magazine, of course, but the cost to run a decent sized full-color ad was way more than I wanted to pay.
After the article was published (resulting in numerous sales of the DVD), the publisher said something to me that I will never forget:
“Editorial ink trumps advertising ink.”
Worth remembering, that.
Hi Melissa:
You can check out the PR section of my web site to see how I write the releases. I’ve tried more recently to be a bit (just a bit) more creative in the writing so that it is more interesting to read than some dull corporate missive, which is how I used to write them. I think the key, in my case, is to not over-saturate the editors with my content so I send them something only maybe 4x a year unless its a really big story…which in the big scheme of things, mine hardly ever are. I hope this helps. So glad you stopped by to visit. I hope you are well.
Best always,
–Peter
Rod that’s an awesome quote. Thanks!
Best always,
–Peter