How To... Make TV Adverts Without Really Trying

In a world of satellite, cable and digital television, there are more and more adverts bombarding us on the TV screens. And with the increased number of adverts, comes a crisis: there are too many adverts and not enough people to make them!

It's time to cash in on the ad boom, and thankfully you don't need to know anything about making adverts to get into the industry. All you need is our simple guide...

Getting Started

The hardest part is getting the customers in the first place. Unfortunately we can't help you get them - you'll need to go out and get them for yourself. What we do recommend is that you start off by making some test adverts and showing them to potential clients. Video tape in hand, you can dazzle them with your amazing skills and abilities.

This is the hardest part. Actually writing and making the adverts is (thankfully) child's play in comparison, as it's easy to make TV adverts, as ads for various products always stick to the rules below.

Beware! Imitate! Don't innovate! Clients aren't interested your ideas. The only things they care about is patronising their potential customers enough to flog them enough of their product.

So just what are the rules for those products them?

Shampoo Adverts Aimed At Women

Some would say these are the easiest adverts to make. All you need are the following ingredients:

1. Some long haired famous actress or model. One with absolutely no personality at all is preferred.
2. Lots of meaningless scientific sounding mumbo jumbo that said actress/model can tell the viewer about. Appropriately meaningless buzzwords could include dermatological, fruit acids, fruit anti-acids, fruit amino-acids, organa-phosphates, organo-oxils, or doxy-derma-hydroxy-window-sill-anti-ant acids, or any other random crap you can make up that will overwhelm and impress your target audience.. All these words should be displayed on screen, scrolling across in an artistic, yet unreadable way, as the star of the advert says them.
3. Computer generated shots that are supposed to be hair follicles close up. Have seemingly random (and preferably red) blobs hit the hair, and then make it glow.

Once you've got these, the rest is easy. All you have to do now is get your star to pose in various positions, whilst flicking back their hair - having made sure that it looks appropriate shiny. Feeding your star with a few cans of a high quality dog food should provide the glossy coat, I mean hair.

Indeed the only problem you may come up against whilst doing one of these ads is if your star isn't able to coherently pronounce all your pseudo-scientific buzzwords. In this case, she's obviously more in touch with your target audience, so give her a pay rise and get some deep voiced man in to do the 'science part'.

Shampoo Adverts Aimed At Men

These are rarer, and fall into two main camps. The first is the anti-dandruff brigade.

To do one of these adverts, you basically need a lead male who doesn't mind you emptying a whole tub of talcom powder over his head, just seconds before you do a close up of his scalp. Then all you need to do is cut to a picture of his hair 'after he used the shampoo' (ie before you put the talc on his head), say how wonderful the shampoo is, and it's a wrap and you're a couple of grand richer!

The other type is similar to the Women's shampoo advert described above. This time however you need an appropriate man with long hair (well that will be David Ginola then) and you will need to cut out the pseudo-scientific crap, as men are much less likely to fall for that rubbish. Just mention a lot how hard said male's hair looks now he's actually bothered to wash it.

Toy Adverts

Advertising to kids is a doddle. All you have to do is make your toy look as great as possible and leave it to sell itself. The pester factor is the way to sell things and your adverts will sucker them in big style!

The advert itself depends entirely on the type of toy your trying to sell, although they all revolve around some annoyingly cute and smug looking kids sat round having 'fun'. The different variations are as below:

Dolls and other girl-orientated figurines:

In this case, your annoying kids should always be female, who should sit around big dolls houses, plonking annoying plastic figurines in cars, combing their hair or putting them to bed. You should also get your stars to do voices for their dolls. In some cases the product may involve extras like nail varnish, just like INSERT NAME OF DOLL HERE does. In these cases you should show a child 'acting just like her doll' and being generally pleased and excruciatingly impressed to be caking her self with the gunk that has been supplied with the product.

Action Figures:

Note that despite the fact that they blatantly are, these are Action Figures, NOT dolls. Yes, we all know that they are dolls, but you won't sell many by calling them that. Besides, dolls don't come with miniature machine guns to blast away the enemy. To sell these products, have some completely over the top play area for the kids which looks like a replica battle-zone, complete with realistic looking sand and grass. You then need to show the figures getting into various 'battle cruisers' or similar and careering off the 'sand dunes' when one of the kids throws a replica scud missile at the characters. Have the kids making fake explosion noises for added effect.

Board Games:

These require minimal set - basically a table in a plain studio with a bright backdrop will do. Show lots of children of a same age playing the game and having lots of fun. Make no attempt to emulate real life by having one child having a tantrum and throwing the board across the room just because they lost. This will not sell your product. However you can get some random 16 year old to 'amusingly' try to join the game, only for the kids to 'amusingly' tell him or her to go away.

Supermarket Adverts

Perhaps some of the cheapest adverts around to make, these basically consist of some actress pretending to be a housewife talking about special offers. These can either be set in a kitchen or in a supermarket. It's also worth noting that your actress should always buy branded products, most of which are meat based. All should be 'amazing savings'!

Seasonal adverts for Christmas, Easter, St Andrew's Day and Nurses Day should always be made, and should always mention how many people will be coming round to dinner on these days, and should, in some way, always include the housewife picking up the largest frozen turkey in the world.

At Easter, don't forget to put in big letters the words 'CLOSED EASTER SUNDAY' on screen at the end, thus sending those watching into a purchasing frenzy because the shops will be shut. Your supermarket client will then find their takings quadruple as the punters rush through the store to buy everything in sight.

Adverts for Music and Video shops

Probably one of the easiest accounts to steal away from your rivals as these adverts as extraordinarily cheap and very, very easy to make - especially the way we're going to do them!

First of all, get a piece of cardboard and put the logo of the shop at the bottom of the screen. Cut out a hole in the middle and put behind that hole, a television screen. The TV should be connected to a video recorder.

There are now two ways to proceed:

Music CD adverts

Easy. Just put on a blank video cassette, random clips of videos from the album you are trying to sell. Make sure that the clips are only of the major hit singles from that album.

DVD or Video

Play various scenes from the DVD or video. These scenes should be chosen entirely at random and should not make any sense when played together in a big long row.

Now all you need to do is stick a camera in front of you video/cardboard/TV arrangement, and record the action going on.

Once the video has finished playing, stop, and film a new caption featuring the price of the product, along with a nice picture of it. An easy way to earn megabucks.

Note: Your clients may begin to notice how cheaply your ads look and may ask for a reduction in your fees. Do not submit, but mention how expensive the clips cost to show on TV, as well as wear and tear on the cardboard.

Now Get To It!

Whilst we haven't covered every type of advert, you have enough to build a successful business. Further inspiration can be found by watching digital television channels which have several hundred different types of advert, all of which are cheap and exactly the same.

So get out there and put your new found knowledge to work!

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