Talk to local business owners of similar-sized companies who have used the medium successfully. Meet with sales representatives from your local TV stations and endure their spiel. He thinks television is a great place to do that. Everybody watching television has immediate access to a pen and a piece of paper and a telephone. Television can be used locally by some advertisers on a very low budget to produce immediate response.
Immediate response is difficult to get over the radio.
To get on the air, you'll need a commercial, usually a 30-second spot. Some stations may offer to produce your spot free if you commit to a schedule of three months plus, but you probably won't be able to air that spot on competing stations. While your sales rep can readily steer you to the shows that match up best with your budget and customer demographics as determined by the Nielsen ratings, Davis suggests a simpler way to determine where to buy time. If you're watching a particular channel every day and you see the same kinds of ads on there all day long, every day, every month, you can be sure that that particular kind of product or service works in that kind of program or they wouldn't be doing it. Media buyer Leslie Speidel says ad rates reflect not only the difficulty of reaching particular audiences, but how much advertisers value them as customers.