Before the 2010 holiday shopping season started, Dynomighty Design president/CEO Terrence Kelleman was looking for a new way to spread the work about the gift merchant’s flagship product, the Mighty Wallet.
Kelleman, who will speak about the power on online video May 4, 2011 at MCM Live in New York, went both old-school and new-school with his approach. And it worked: Sales of the trendy wallets, made of a single sheet of Tyvek, rise 400% in just two weeks, he says.
The old-school approach involved television advertising, with a 2010 twist. With the cost of television advertising out of reach for most small merchants, Kelleman used Google TV’s auction-based platform to buy excess 30-second ad spot inventory on The Dish Network and DirecTV during airings of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.
The ads, which began airing on Oct. 16, included a QR code and the directive to pause the commercial, scan the code and then buy a wallet from Dynomighty’s MightyWallet.com mcommerce site.
How much did this cost Dynamighty? Kelleman’s total budget was $1,500: the average cost per TV spot was $175, and the ad reached about 360,000 viewers, according to the invoice Kelleman received from Google.
As for the production, the spot was shot with a $200 point-and-shoot camera, and was edited on a MacBook Pro laptop using iMovie, and narrated by Kelleman himself.
There was not a lot of time invested in the spots: Kelleman says he spent about two months mulling over the idea, and one to two weeks shooting and creating the video.
How does Kelleman knows the ad spots drove wallet sales? In the checkout process, Dynomighty asked customers how they heard about the Mighty Wallet, and 63% answered that they saw the 30-second spot.
Is there anything Kelleman would do different the next time around?
“I wished that I had created individual QR codes for each variance of the TV ad so that I could see the unique scans for that ad,” Kelleman says. “This is something I’m working on for next season.”
Want to learn more about how Dynomighty Design is creating video content on a shoestring budget and using it to drive sales? Attend MCM Live in New York, where Kelleman will speak about video and other Internet technologies May 4 at 11:15 a.m.
Here’s the commercial Kelleman produced: