TV Advertising for Your Club

[Capt. Slo-mo]

OK, happy club owners, here's a question for you:

I am working on a proposal to produce two 30-second spots for the USFA to help swell grassroots interest in fencing. One would be a generic public service announcement (PSA) using our Olympian fencers pitching the idea of fencing as a great physical fitness sport. PSAs run on local stations or cable cut-ins free of charge, but often don't get the best time slots.

The other would be a generic "try fencing, it's fun!" commercial that you, as club owners, could take to your local station or cable company, get your club's name and contact information striped onto the video, and then air as a paid spot.

The spots would be made available to you at little or no cost...most likely $100 or less. The Comcast boys here in Portland say it'll likely be just a couple of hundred bucks to put the CG information for your club on the commercial, and then be ready to go. You're on your own to decide how much ad time to buy and how much money you'd want to spend airing the commercial.

My thought is that you'd take both the PSA and the ad in together and strike a deal that your willingness to buy some ad time is increased by how much they also run the PSA. The PSA, by the way, encourages potential fencers to follow the usfencing.org link to "find a club near them."

Now, input from you. How interested are you in seeing these spots produced? Is it something you could take advantage of? What information would you like to see included in the script of the generic spot?

While the USFA can't do the ad buys for you, what this plan does do is avoid the thousands of dollars of production shooting, editing and scriptwriting costs each club would have to spend to produce these two commercials by themselves, and maybe leverage the impact a bit with the synergy of the PSA and the generic commercial running in tandem.

I will mention that I've been told by several marketing folks that spots like these work best in conjunction with a larger marketing plan...to reinforce and remind people of your club's existence from other, simultaneous efforts you're making.

Some of you know me, some don't. I do TV programming for a living, and have offered to shoot and edit these commercials pro bono to help you and the USFA. By tying them in part to the Beijing Olympics, we can also hopefully capitalize on any Olympic success. My hope would be that we'd have these pretty much ready to go for immediate distribution within days of the fencing events at the Olympics.

So...your thoughts?

[Hauptman]

I'm not a club owner, but I have been a business owner and manager over the years. And I am well aware of the value and expense of advertising.

I think this is a great idea!!