TV Advertising, Explained

Most of what puts people off TV advertising is not the cost. It is not knowing how it works, and being quietly worried they will get fleeced. Here is the honest version, so you can walk into the conversation knowing roughly what you are dealing with.

Television is not as expensive as page one of Google suggests

Search for a TV advert production company and you’ll mostly find London agencies. One of the highest-ranking states its range openly: £80,000 to £450,000. That number is real, and for a national brand campaign it’s an honest one.

It’s also wildly unrepresentative.

Thinkbox is the marketing body for UK commercial television. It’s funded by the broadcasters themselves, so it has every reason to make TV sound expensive and exclusive. Its own figures for 2024 say something else. 675 advertisers spent less than £50,000 on TV that year. Over 275 spent less than £10,000. In the same year, 932 new advertisers appeared on television, an 18% increase.

Hundreds of British companies are on television for less than the price of a mid-range car. Nobody’s landing page leads with that, because nobody selling a six-figure production wants it to be the first thing you read.

The two budgets, and why conflating them wrecks your planning

A TV advert has two separate costs, and they are not paid to the same people.

• Production. Making the advert. Script, crew, shoot, edit, sound, graphics, delivery. That’s what a production company like us charges for.
• Media. Buying the airtime. That’s paid to the broadcasters, usually through a media buyer, and it has nothing to do with what the film cost to make.

Pour everything into the film and leave nothing to buy the airtime, and almost nobody sees your advert. Weighting it the other way works better than people expect. Thinkbox puts the average cost of the media space to get one person in the UK to see a TV ad at £0.72, across linear and addressable.

Get the split wrong and you have an expensive film nobody watched. We’ll tell you if your budget is weighted the wrong way, even when the answer is that you should spend less with us and more with the broadcaster.

Clearcast: free, unavoidable, and the reason people miss their air date

Every advert on UK television has to be cleared before it can be broadcast. Clearcast is the body that does it, and the process runs in three stages: script, rough cut, and final advert.

Two things about Clearcast are almost never mentioned by the companies selling you a TV advert.

1. It doesn’t cost anything. Standard clearance carries no fee, as long as the advert runs on a channel Clearcast clears for (which includes on-demand and online) and comes in under five minutes. Clearance isn’t the hidden invoice people brace for.
2. It will eat your timeline. Clearcast advises allowing two to three weeks, and the bulk of that sits at the script stage, which on its own takes around two weeks. Rough cut and final approval are roughly two working days each.

The ordering is what matters. Clearance starts at script, before a camera comes out of its case. If you write, shoot and edit an advert and then submit it, you’ve inverted the process, and a claim Clearcast won’t accept means reshooting rather than rewriting. It’s a common mistake in first-time TV advertising, it’s an expensive one, and it’s avoidable.

If you genuinely are against the clock, Clearcast sells a Fast Track service at £660 + VAT covering all three stages, with guaranteed feedback inside 24 hours, and a two-hour final approval at £1,320 + VAT. Worth knowing it exists, though it’s better not to need it.

One more thing. If you’re running the advert on catch-up or streaming rather than linear TV, that still needs approval. VOD isn’t a way around clearance.

The cost that turns up after the invoice: usage fees

Nobody on page one of Google mentions this, and it’s the one that produces the angriest phone calls.

If you put a professional performer in your advert, you aren’t buying them once. UK commercials are built on a basic fee plus a usage fee, scaled to how much the advert is actually seen. Equity, the performers’ union, publishes a calculator for exactly this. It works from TVRs and impressions to produce a guideline usage figure.

• A cheap shoot with a broad usage term is not a cheap advert.
• Usage is time-limited. When the term ends, running the advert again costs more.
• Extending the run, adding territories, or moving the advert to new platforms are each separately chargeable.
• The same goes for music. A licence for a defined term is not a licence forever.

Two adverts with identical production costs can differ by thousands over their lifetime, entirely because of usage. We’ll model that with you before we cast, not after. The cheapest fix is choosing a different route at script stage, and by the time you’re renewing, the cheap options have gone.

The formats worth knowing

• Brand spots. The conventional 30-second advert. Builds recognition, and it’s the most expensive route.
• Sponsorship idents. Short, repeated, tied to a programme. The route we’d suggest for most regional advertisers, and the one we made for Selco on Sky Sports.
• DRTV. Direct response. A phone number or a URL, and a clear instruction. Judged on response, not on warmth.
• VOD and addressable. Delivered through catch-up and streaming, targetable by audience rather than by programme. Still needs clearance.

How we make it, brief to broadcast

1. Brief. What the advert has to achieve, who it’s for, and what the media plan looks like. If you don’t have a media buyer yet, tell us before we write.
2. Script and route. We write, and we submit to Clearcast at script stage. Approval comes back before we spend a penny on the shoot.
3. Pre-production. Cast, crew, locations, and the usage terms agreed up front.
4. Shoot. Ours or your site, and we film nationally.
5. Edit. Cut, grade, sound, graphics. The rough cut goes to Clearcast.
6. Delivery. Final approval, clocked advert, delivered to the broadcaster in their format.

Why a Midlands base costs you less than a London one

The same crew, kit and post-production cost less outside the M25, and the difference isn’t small. We’re in Nuneaton, twenty minutes from Coventry and half an hour from Birmingham, and we travel. The Selco idents ran nationally on Sky Sports, and we’ve made films for the NHS, TNT, National Express and TEDx. You’re paying for the film, not for a Soho postcode.