New Trend: Advertisng Your Real Estate Business On Local Cable TV
Old Trend: Newspaper Print Advertising
Why: More Bang For Your Buck.
How: Via Spot runner: Create Your Ad Online
“At Spot Runner we make it easy, simple and affordable for everyone to take advantage of local TV advertising. We started Spot Runner because we saw three important opportunities:
- Small and medium-sized business people want to advertise on TV but the costs of creating ads are prohibitive.
- Choosing a media plan, negotiating the price, and tracking your advertising can be time consuming and difficult.
- Great TV advertising could be made more quickly and at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising agencies.
We put these elements together and Spot Runner was born.”
According to Richard A. Smith, Chairman and CEO of Cendant Real Estate Services Division,
“Realtors now spend almost $4.7 billion a year on print advertising, and Smith believes that money will shift toward outlets like local TV. “Any large company that’s an umbrella over thousands of small affiliates has an immense opportunity with Spot Runner,” he says. “TV is a more efficient way to market.”
It seems that not only is print advertising taking a hit from online venues but now TV as well. With a company like Spot Runner, Real Estate advertisers now have an alternative cost effective solution to promote themselves and their companies on local TV. For virtually the same price of a single Ad in the newspaper, you can run a TV commercial on your favorite channel durring your favorite show. Now that’s cool.
Maybe you’ll see a Sellsius TV spot in between your favorite TV show unless you have TIVO and fast foward through the commercials.
Real Estate Pros have actually had these low cost services available for years. The only thing that has changed is the wrapper. By reading the fine print on the Spotrunner web site and comparing it to a semi-automated discount ad agency called Cheap-TV-Spots.com, I found that Spotrunner’s only advantage is its user interface. Spotrunner offers no real savings or value over similar service paradigms. The automated Spotrunner airings actually cost more than the semi-automated Cheap-TV-Spots.com system (air time is the most expensive part of any TV campaign). Spotrunner offers an upgraded ad comparable to CheapTVSpots standard custom ad, but at a price nearly 5 times the Cheap TV Spots rate. Spotrunner does not appear to allow national airings (because of licensing restrictions), and it does not allow a web version of the commercial to be freely distributed by the client. Cheap TV Spots, by contrast, provides both local and national airings, and allows the client to freely distribute a web version via e-mail and web postings. Spotrunner forces the real estate agency to keep purchasing their more expensive air time or Spot Runner will re-sell their ad to the agent’s competitor in the same market. Again, by comparison, the Cheap TV Spots system delivers local and national service with maximum flexibility at a cost (including air time) which is less than the limited Spotrunner system. Cheap TV Spots does not insist on long term contracts for air time. Spotrunner, inconveniently, also charges to speak to a live person. There are Silicon Valley rumors about Cheap-TV-Spots.com acquiring Spotrunner. Cheap TV Spots actually has the better system and has been around longer, but to the average agent or broker, Spotrunner’s interface could be appealing. A CheapTVSpots.com / Spotrunner hybrid model is actually the most compelling model for our business sector, and a real acquisition for Google, Yahoo, or even Ask.com.
Great info RE Pro. Thanks for sharing the tip on Cheap-TV-Spots. It sounds like a great value.
Sounds a bit like pumping if you ask me…. but what do I know?
Funny… it sounds like you just told me that there are rumors that the minnow may swallow the whale. Cheap-TV gets only a small FRACTION web traffic as SpotRunner.
Where might I see some of these Silicon Valley rumors?
Does the company name include the “.com”, or is it written 4 times for the engines to see?
Maybe the only thing CHEAP about the Cheap-TV-Spots, is the company’s business model… or choice of a sitename. Didn’t anyone explain to them about special characters in a domain name?
Poor saps.
I think the name Cheap TV Spots is meant as tongue-in-cheek, StuartD. If you’d bothered to try it out, you’d have found they do appear to have a site at cheaptvspots.com without the dashes, too. It’s only a web rumor that the dashes harm a domain name. You’ll see as many people tell you that the dashes are just fine. Also, it looks like they are just one service offered by a larger media company. You can’t judge a company’s total influence - or its bank account - by its web hits, IMHO.
As for business models, remember there were lots of production companies doing local ads long before these Spot Runner guys got into it. Spot Runner borrows a lot of its supposedly disruptive business model from these older, more established agencies and boutique video producers. Personally, I’m not too excited about Spot runner because they don’t seem to offer the level of real human interaction I’d expect from an ad agency. This alone could drive lots of people off the Spot Runner site and onto the Cheap TV Spots site - with or without dashes. Your “poor saps” may be crying all the way to the bank.
Thanks for the info Leaver. Have you worked with any that you could recommend?