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Comment by jaywalk | Hacker News Reader

"the production budget was tiny, less then $100k"

My video production skills are pretty basic, but even I could have produced that ad.

I produced a 65-minute feature [0] for like $100. I salivate at the idea of having $100k to make something. And they're like "we had a tiny budget, only $100k for this screensaver with a QR code"

curls up into a ball and cries

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10232800/

I truly don't understand how it costs $100k to produce this particular ad. Can somebody explain? Where does $100k go to for a QR code bouncing?

Well, you got the meetings with the or agencies, that’s going to cost a ton. Then there is licensing of music which is a known and respected artist. Likely a bunch of other additional costs to an ad agency to create the video and deliver to spec to the channel broadcasting the commercial. Lots of these aren’t huge, but when you get into live tv production, there are a ton of costs that seem insanely high, but it’s the business.

I got that part [1]. But from context, it sounded like the $100k was for creating the ad deliverable itself, not deciding what ad should be done, which would included all the meetings with agencies they rejected. (If the $100k budget included such meetings, it would have been mentioned in the context of saving money by cutting of search early and not having to go through more of those.)

In that case, the only unknown would be the licensing rights, but then, that's still not something to brag about: the people he's bragging to don't know how much of the $100k that ate up, so it's unknown how inefficient they were in making the bouncing QR code.

And if you're just going to explain it by generic "high costs" to "play the game" in "the business", I'm not sure what understanding your comment is actually imparting.

[1] Not the parent but made the same point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30418317

He specifically says "and of course the production budget was tiny, less then $100k)" and further down the thread "Although we didn’t work with a traditional ad agency I’d be remiss not to mention the creative firm we worked with who actually created the ad, commissioned the song, got the clearances etc etc. Honestly, felt like we were all one team so I didn’t fully realize it, thank you!" so it sounds as if they paid a creative firm <$100K to create it which isn't hard for me to believe if they couldn't do it in-house.

Once you get an agency involved for just anything, you're almost certainly in the 10Ks of dollars right off the bat. Lots of people to be fed anytime a creative agency gets involved even for something as simple as writing a paper on some topic.

I thought that included the cost of the ~20 second broadcast cost, but now thinking about it that seems really low.

The last time you could get a 30 second Super Bowl ad for less than $100k was 1973.

no shit, everyone knows that the big cost is broadcasting it

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