Cost guide
What television advertising costs, and why ten seconds has no fixed price
Television is sold in ten-second units against a channel, a feed, a time band and a programme, and each of those moves the rate independently.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 8 min read
Television has no rate, only a rate for one channel, on one feed, in one time band, with a named programme or without one. The unit everywhere is ten seconds, and the whole negotiation is about what surrounds it. A thirty-second film is three units, so the length of your film is arithmetic. What is not arithmetic is why one of those units costs a multiple of another on the same channel on the same day.
Why the same ten seconds costs wildly different amounts
The channel, and what it is for. A general entertainment channel with a captive evening audience prices its evening like a stadium on a match night. A news channel sells far more cheaply per spot and puts you inside a break that carries a great many other advertisers. A niche channel is cheap because it is small, which is a fair trade if it is small in exactly the right way.
The programme. Inventory inside a hit fiction strip, a reality format in its final weeks, or a live match is a different market from the programming around it. Some of it is not sold as spots at all: it is sold as sponsorship, with the price attached to the property rather than to the seconds.
The time band. Evening prime is the contested block. Afternoon and late night are a fraction of it. Morning carries a specific audience that suits specific categories. Buyers who cannot afford prime often do better with a dense afternoon plan than with a thin prime one.
Fixed position or run of day part. A fixed spot means your ten seconds is in a named break in a named programme, and you pay for the certainty. Run of day part means the channel places it anywhere in the band. The gap between those two prices is often the largest single saving available in a television plan.
Frequency, which is the part that is actually bought. Nobody acts on one exposure. A schedule is built to put your film in front of the same household several times a week, for several weeks. So a plan with an impressive channel list and two spots a day on each of them is worse than a narrow plan with real weight behind it.
The season. Festive weeks, a cricket tournament, an election, the launch of a big new show. Each of these takes inventory out of the market and firms up everything around it. A brand launching in the middle of a tournament pays for the tournament whether or not it bought into it.
National and regional are two different purchases
The national feed of a channel carries a rate built on national reach. The regional language feeds of the same broadcaster are sold separately, at their own rates. They are the reason television is within reach of businesses that could never buy a national campaign.
A Kannada entertainment or news feed reaches Karnataka and the Kannada speaker outside it. That is a real, buyable audience for a regional food brand, a jewellery chain, a hospital group, a dealer network or an education group with branches across the state. The same money spent nationally would buy a scatter of exposure in states where nobody can buy from you.
The catch is production. A regional buy needs the film in that language. That means dubbing or a separate shoot, voice casting, and a script that works in Kannada rather than a translation of one that worked in Hindi. Put that cost in the plan at the start.
The words a plan uses, and what they cost you
| Term | What it means | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| FCT | The commercial time a channel is allowed to sell in an hour | How much of the break you are sharing |
| Ten-second unit | The unit every rate is quoted against | What a twenty and a thirty version will cost you across the schedule |
| Run of day part | The channel places your spot inside a band | What the fixed-position premium is, spot by spot |
| Fixed position | A named break in a named programme | Whether it is guaranteed in writing or merely requested |
| Bonus spots | Free inventory added to the deal | Which band they fall in, because leftovers at three in the morning are not a discount |
| Ratings data | The currency the plan is argued on | Which measurement the plan is built on, and for which market and period |
| Telecast certificate | The broadcaster's proof each spot ran | Who reads it against the schedule, line by line |
That last row is where money is quietly recovered. Spots are missed. A schedule read properly against the log turns missed spots into replacement spots, and nobody does it on your behalf unless it was agreed at the start.
What a quotation must break out
- The channel and the exact feed, in the language it goes out in
- The band, and the programme where a position is fixed
- How many spots, on which dates, at which lengths
- Which spots are fixed and which are run of day part, priced separately
- Bonus or free inventory, listed with its band, not folded into the total
- The film: production, versions at ten, twenty and thirty seconds, dubbing per language
- Clearance and certification, and who is responsible for getting it
- Reconciliation against the telecast log, and who does it
- Taxes
What is left out and arrives later
The film, almost always, in proposals that lead with a low airtime number. Dubbing for the second language. Cutting the thirty into a twenty and a ten, which the schedule needs in order to build frequency without tripling the cost. Clearance, which takes time and sits before the first telecast rather than after it. And the ground behind the burst: a campaign number, a landing page and search advertising live for the same weeks. A viewer who looks you up after seeing the film should find something waiting, not a page from 2019.
When television is the wrong buy
When you sell in three localities. This is the big one. A dental practice in Rajajinagar buying a Kannada feed is paying to reach Kalaburagi in order to fill chairs in Rajajinagar. A hoarding on its own arterial costs a fraction of it.
When the budget covers the airtime but not a usable film. Both are then wasted, and it is a recoverable mistake only if you catch it before booking.
When you need an enquiry traced to a spot. Television proves transmission, not viewing, and certainly not intent. If every rupee is judged on cost per lead, this is not your medium.
When the schedule can only afford to be thin. Two spots a day across six channels for a fortnight is a plan that satisfies a review meeting and reaches nobody often enough to matter.
How to sanity check any television proposal
Ask what the same budget would look like as a narrow, heavy burst on one feed in one band for three weeks, against the spread plan you have been shown. Then ask which of the two the seller would run with their own money. The answer to that second question is worth more than the deck.
We plan television only where a business genuinely sells across a region. In the free audit we will say when outdoor, cinema or search buys more for the same money. Our fee for the planning and the reconciliation is written down separately from the airtime and from the film, before anything is booked.
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