This Marketing Co. Wants to Crowdfund Video Ads

New York--Ascend Marketing is inviting a small group of jewelers to pool their resources to create six professionally produced television ads that will be available for license to jewelers across North America.

The Salt Lake City, Utah-based company led by Jim Ackerman, who has contributed numerous columns to National Jeweler, specializes in marketing for jewelers.

Ackerman explained in a press release: “The problem for most jewelers is that they can’t afford to spend $10,000 or $20,000 dollars on producing a top-quality television commercial, so their spots are made locally, not very well conceived, poorly written, cheaply produced, and don’t work particularly well.

“Their other option is to buy in to canned spots produced for the industry. But most of these are comparatively low-budget ads as well, with less-than-ideal scripts and production values.”

In order to create a series of higher-budget, higher-quality ads, Ackerman is asking approximately 12 jewelers to invest in them together, with the first three participants recouping their investment by licensing the commercials to jewelers nationwide, a process which Ackerman estimates will take about a year.

To fully explain the process and concept behind the commercials Ackerman is hosting webinars on the following dates.

Tuesday, April 3 at 2 p.m. EST
Thursday, April 12 at 2 p.m. EST
Wednesday, May 2 at 2 p.m. EST

Registration for the webinars is available online.

Ackerman continued, “These commercials would normally cost upwards of $30,000 each, perhaps much more, if produced individually. But we can achieve substantial savings by shooting the entire collection at once. Our idea is to have a small group of retail jewelers front the production costs for a fraction of what they’d pay for producing just one of these videos on their own.

“Not only will those jewelers have a minimum of three years rights to the videos in their protected territories, but we will also reimburse the first few for their entire investment from license fees paid for use of the commercials by other, non-competing jewelers. We expect the contributing jewelers to recover their investment within the first year.”

He is calling the six TV spots “The Tear & the Tickle Campaign,” as they are meant to elicit “that emotional tearing up, or warm tickle in the belly,” he said.

Each spot is geared toward a specific occasion—an engagement, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, a birthday and an anniversary.

The scripts for each commercial have been completed and will be discussed in the webinars.