|
TV is obviously incredibly powerful given its reach and inherently "rich media" format. TechTV/G4 did a minute and a half segment about Achaea a couple years ago and it was absolutely flooded with newbies for the next few days, to the tune of over 1000 newbies/day on a couple days.
In the end, Achaea directly garnered 66 customers from that 90 second tv spot that ran probably only 3 times, and those customers have spent a total of somewhere around $25,000 so far. The real impact of the TechTV spot is likely somewhat significantly higher since word of mouth is so powerful and acts as a multiplier for all other forms of advertising.
Unfortunately, I'm not really sure how to extrapolate the success of the TechTV/G4 spot (which was a review of Achaea, not a commercial paid for by us or whatnot) to a tv commercial. There are no doubt differences of some sort between a commercial and a review, but how big those differences are (and whether the review actually is more valuable than the commercial, wihch seems likely but that's purely a guess), I dunno. I also haven't really looked into what it costs to produce a decent tv spot (not cheap though I'm sure) and to then buy the airtime.
Overall, despite the review's success for Achaea, my gut is that a tv commercial is probably not going to be economically feasible unless you're just trying to build market share. I think it's worth considering that even the big graphical MMOs don't do a lot of tv advertising, at least on the tv channels I watch (well, maybe they do in Asia, I don't know).
--matt
|