How much does a corporate video cost?
Answered : How Much Does a Corporate Video Cost ?
When speaking to a video production company knowing what information to relay, and relaying that information clearly and uniformly across all the vendors you are considering for your project will help you get the correct video production estimates and identify the one that offers the best value. This is especially more important in areas like New York and Los Angeles, where labor costs can be significant, and you want to manage costs as tightly as possible.
For example, there may be no way for you to compare costs and value offered by different TV commercial production companies in New York City if you tell them something along the lines of ‘We want a beautiful video.’ That’s vague. Overly broad. Not very well-defined. Indeed, beautiful video means different things to each production company, and the production companies will come back with numbers that vary widely. You may now be confused and without one uniform parameter to gauge the companies. You may be stuck in choosing a vendor because they offered the cheapest price, not necessarily because they offered the best value for your dollar.
So let us get you out of vague, broad, and undefined to specific and narrow, so you can measure all your prospective vendors with a uniform yardstick.
Below is an example of an email from a client that is out to get the best value for her dollar:
‘Hello,
We are X, a financial brokerage firm in New York City.
We are looking for a TV commercial production company in New York that will air in these markets (insert your markets here), during these periods (insert your campaign run time here). live on several pages of our company site.
The campaign needs to communicate to prospective clients about our new financial product that we are launching this fall. This product will enable our clients to hedge their trading risks especially when the stock market is bearish. You can read more about the financial product at this link here.
The TV Commercial should be able to explain clearly the advantages of why trading this particular product will make more returns for our clients.
There is no script or concept yet, but the video is to have the sleek, corporate feel of Bloomberg / CNBC. We know that our clients are looking to trade globally, so we would like to communicate visually the global reach that this product opens up to our clients. The concept has to be able to communicate this.
Our needs:
1. We would also like the video to be a mix of live action and some motion graphics… not sure as of right now, you can advise on that.
2. We would like to shoot the video here in New York, but are open to other locations.
3. We would like to have the concept and storyboard finalized by the mid of next month, and the final video to be in seven weeks from now.
4. The videos have to be translated into voice-overs in Mandarin, Spanish, French, and Italian. Can you do that?
5. We would like this video to meet or exceed this standard of these examples here (provide samples of other campaigns you have done, or that you like from YouTube etc)
Our resources:
1. Our budget is X – Y
2. Our timeline is A – B
Does this project and budget interest you? If yes, we would like to see examples of work that match the quality mentioned above, and we would like to hear about the creative direction that you would take if you were to produce the video.
Thanks,
Marketing Manager That Wants A Brilliant Ad Campaign
This is an email that producers receive in their coziest dreams. Producers see this and know that this is someone who knows how to communicate what they want and will be a good client to work with, regardless of budget.
This email communicates the quality the client expects by providing sample works that this new video will have to match. It also states the anticipated scope of work, the medium of communication for the videos, and the target audiences. The client company allows some creative freedom, while clearly stating the limits of that freedom by highlighting what the concept should do – communicate visually that their products open unlimited access to global financial markets.
She shares the known requirements, such as the foreign-language voice-over, and those unknown, such as the use of motion graphics. She clearly states the budget and wants samples that have been produced within similar budgets.
This manager is not looking for cheap but for the best dollar value. The production company can gauge its capabilities and know if this is a job that they are able to accomplish or not.
As you can imagine, this manager will not have difficulty in finding a production company that offers her what she wants.