How to make a TV commercial

A television commercial is watched in a room rather than by a person. Somebody is cooking, somebody else is on a phone, the volume is low, and your film is the fourth in a break of a dozen. The craft problem is not making a good film. It is making one that still delivers a brand name to a half-attentive room, holds a legal disclaimer and cuts down to ten seconds. Then survives being dubbed into the language of the feed you bought.

Design for the room, not for the edit suite

Assume the sound is not being heard properly. If the only place your brand name appears is the voice-over, half your audience has watched an unbranded film. Put the name on screen and keep the logo present at the end for long enough to read twice. A viewer who never hears a word should still leave with the name.

Assume the viewer is not looking at the start. The first two seconds of a spot are spent by the room noticing that a new film has begun. Open on a change of colour, or on a sound different from the spot before you. Hold that opening image a beat longer than feels right in the edit.

Assume nobody will write anything down. A ten-digit number read aloud once is gone. A name somebody can search later survives, which is why the end frame matters more than the number.

What the break does to your film

A break on a general entertainment channel runs long, and your spot sits inside it with a dozen others fighting the same room. Two things follow.

Contrast with your neighbours, not with your last campaign. If every spot in that break is a bright interior with a family, a dark frame and one voice is the one that gets looked at.

Do not try to win on volume. The regulator has ruled that an advertisement may not be louder than the programme it sits in, and channels deliver against a loudness standard. Ask your studio which one the channel wants and have the master made to it. A film mixed to be loud will come back quieter than you approved, and anything you buried under that loudness will not be heard at all.

The disclaimer eats your seconds

Advertise a clinic, a financial product, an educational outcome, a food claim or anything about health, and a disclaimer will have to be on screen. Legible, and held long enough to be read. That is real time out of thirty seconds and it is not optional.

Find out what your category needs before the storyboard. Advertisers discover the requirement at the delivery stage, lose four seconds to a super, and lose them from the one place the film could not spare. Some categories cannot be advertised on television at all.

Keep supers out of the bottom of the frame. News channels run tickers and the channel's own graphics across the lower band, and your carefully set phone number sits underneath a scroll about something else.

The feed you bought decides the language, and the shoot decides the cost

Television in India is sold by feed. Buy the Karnataka feed of a general entertainment channel and the film plays in Kannada. Add a Telugu channel for the Ballari and Raichur belt and you need a Telugu version, recorded and delivered to that channel separately.

This is the part of the plan that is settled at the storyboard rather than in the edit, because it changes how the film is shot. Cutting one master into several lengths is its own job, covered separately.

How you shoot decides what that costs. A film built on dialogue to camera has to be dubbed to lips. That needs a translated script written to the mouth rather than to the meaning, and it rarely sits right. A film built on visuals with a voice-over is re-recorded in a day in each language. For an advertiser buying more than one regional feed, that single decision at the storyboard stage is the difference between one recording session and a month of trouble. Kannada creative and Telugu creative cover what changes inside each script.

The end frame carries more weight than the idea

The last three seconds are the only part of the film that every viewer sees at the same size, in the same place, in every version you cut. Treat it as a piece of design rather than as a card the editor makes on the last day.

Put the brand name in type big enough to read from a sofa, and one line that says what you sell. Then one way to reach you that a person can remember without a pen. A short website address or a name to search works. A ten-digit number does not, unless you are also holding it in the voice-over and on screen for a full five seconds, which is a sixth of the film.

Design the end frame first, in fact. It is the frame your 10-second cut is mostly made of, and the still that goes on the newspaper ad. It is also the only thing a muted room takes away.

A worked example

A water purifier brand in Peenya buys four weeks on a Kannada general entertainment channel and two weeks on a Kannada news channel, then repeats in the festive window.

It shoots one film: a kitchen, a tap, a mother, no dialogue, a voice-over and an end frame with the brand and the word Bengaluru. From that one day it gets a 30, a 15 and a 10, plus a Telugu voice-over for the north Karnataka border buy. It also gets frames for a set of cutdowns on YouTube.

No lip sync anywhere in it. That was the decision that made all the rest cheap.

What to do next

Before you approve a storyboard, write down the durations, the languages and the disclaimer your category carries, and hand that page to the production house with the script. Then watch two hours of the channel you are buying, with the sound low, and see what actually reaches you from the other side of the room. If you want the media plan and the film brief written together rather than one after the other, book the free audit.