David Craig, on September 8th, 2022Thursday/Friday blog
Making a cut-price TV ad
Having a bit of time on my hands, I decided to make a 30-second TV ad to try to sell a few copies of my recent book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS.
Even just a few years ago, the idea of trying to advertise your books on TV would have seemed ridiculous. For a start, you’d probably have had to pay an advertising agency over £30,000 just to produce a 30-second TV-quality ad. Then the cost of running the ad would have been in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. But things have changed.
Now you can make a TV ad for just a few hundred pounds. For example, you could choose a popular song and buy the karaoke musical version for less than £2. You could then write new words to the song promoting your book and, from a freelancers’ website like PeoplePerHour, find an excellent singer to record your version for about £80.
After that you’ll need some visuals. Again, using a freelancers’ website like PeoplePerHour, you can find a experienced graphic artist who, for a couple of hundred pounds, can put together 30 seconds of visuals telling viewers about your book and why they should buy it.
Previously there were two main problems with buying TV advertising spots. Firstly, they were hugely expensive costing thousands of pounds for each spot. And secondly, most were a waste of money as the majority of viewers wouldn’t have been in the target market for buying your book. As one business executive famously said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.
But now there are so many TV channels, you can choose one that is much more likely to reach your target market than traditional mainstream TV stations. So, whether your subject is history or nature or geography or current affairs or arts and crafts or whatever, it should be possible to find a TV channel that is likely to attract viewers interested in that subject. Moreover, running a 30-second TV ad on some of these specialist channels can often cost only a couple of hundred pounds. So you can now reach a better-targeted group of potential customers at a much lower cost.
Being banned by GB News
I had planned to run the ad a couple of times on GB News during either the Nigel Farage or Mark Steyn shows to see whether it could pay for itself by selling a few books.
Any ads must be approved by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and any claims made by potential advertisers have to be substantiated. So I backed up my submission with around 70,000 words of text and over 100 charts, diagrams and scientific reports. However, when I submitted my proposed ad for approval, I was informed that ‘title of the book is misleading and socially irresponsible’ because ‘the Advertising Standards Authority has accepted that man made climate change is happening’.
As part of my ad being banned, I was referred to the ASA’s policies on climate change where the ASA states: ‘The ASA recognises that as governments set new and ambitious targets and as the scale of the challenge to avoid catastrophic climate change becomes ever clearer, advertising and, by extension, ad regulation needs to play its part in working towards agreed climate goals.’
How the ASA became a woke censor of ‘politically-incorrect’ opinions
I can understand that our advertising authorities would want to prevent ads from making false claims such as whether a certain drink will make you more attractive to potential partners or whether some brand of mineral water will make you into a sporting superstar. But now it seems that the ASA believes it has a role in deciding what issues may or may not be discussed.
The ‘scientific method’ involves a process of continually making and testing hypotheses so that human knowledge evolves. But the ASA, like the BBC, appears to be of the opinion that science is static and that new discoveries cannot be allowed to question previously-accepted assumptions even about a complex thermodynamic system such as the Earth’s climate. But even worse, not only does the ASA ban any ads questioning the climate-catastrophist cult, but, again like the BBC, it also claims it ‘needs to play its part in working towards agreed climate goals’ in order to ‘ avoid catastrophic climate change’.
It’s fortunate that we didn’t have the Advertising Standards Authority or the BBC in Copernicus’s time otherwise it might have taken us several hundred years more to discover that the Earth orbits around the Sun.
Here’s my banned ad
This is the rough first version of my ad. OK, it’s not Steven Spielberg quality. But I’m not trying to win an Oscar, I’m just trying to shift a few books:
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I’m sorry to say that I don’t think this was your best idea. I can’t even recall seeing a book advert on TV. I bought your book partly to support your work and I recommend it because it isn’t packed with incomprehensible science and focuses on what everybody should be able to understand. I think you have to ask whether the advert would attract a believer in the nonsense to buy your book, and I feel the answer is no. I wonder how long it will take YouTube to ban the video? Recently, I bought a book promoting the human cause to see what their latest lies are about. I still have to open it.
The far better approach is to get interviewed by Farage or Steyn and they can promote your book, which they have done with others. I think I may have mentioned that Farage recently interviewed two people with opposing views on climate and neither produced a word of evidence to support what they said. I suspect that Farage and Steyn can see the damage the net zero policies are doing, but they haven’t a clue about the science or the empirical evidence.
Regarding the ASA, there were two adverts by Eon on Classic FM within a few minutes of each other this morning. The first was for solar panels claiming electricity savings with no mention of the capital and maintenance costs or their lifetime. The second was promoting electric cars to save the environment with no mention of where the electricity was coming from, or the short battery life and recycling issues. The ASA has been bought just like the MHRA and the MSM.
Believe me, I have tried everything I can think of to get on GB News but never get invited. I even had a friend of Farage recommend he interview me. Farage refused. If you watch GB News, especially Mark Steyn, he has a few chums (some of whom don’t seem to be qualified in anything apart from being young, attractive, female and blond) whom he repeatedly invites on his programme and it’s all getting a bit repetitive IMHO
David, thanks for that comment. It seems we are agreed about GB News. I record Farage and Steyn and I tend to zoom through it these days. They are not only repetitive but unconvincing through lack of facts and ideas on what to do.
I have just seen an article published on Global Research “Former Greenpeace Founder Patrick Moore Says Climate Change Based on False Narratives”. Even the well-known people don’t get on GN News. But perhaps the continued effort is working which is what Mattias Desmet says we have to do. There was a big demonstration in Prague about energy and the Dutch Agricultural Minister has resigned. Unfortunately, I fear that too much damage has been done.
I have to admire your efforts with this website and books. You do more than most of us.
I have to agree about GB News it’s becoming repetitive and boring with no solutions offered.
Your headline was a bit misleading David, it wasn’t GB news who blocked the ad but the ASA. Although I agree with A Thorpe – you never see a book advertised. Authors get onto chat shows to plug their books but you’re fighting an uphill battle there.
Reading your story I thought of Galileo (before you mentioned Copernicus). I googled him to check my facts “He was tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.”
At least you still have your liberty …… so far
The Advertising Standards Authority has no business accepting whether or not climate is changing or not. That is well beyond their brief and is well into cencorship territory.
If you every did manage to trace the source of this so called “decision” you would find it was made by some 22 year old pimpled & pocked, holder of a second class degree in “The History of Art”, who has pushed his own opinion through on this while his pals in the office were looking out the window, stunned that it has started to rain again. I suggest David contacts these people and asks for a formal copy of the minutes of the meeting where this matter was discussed and voted on, which is responsible for this unwanted and dangerous decision. I would wager the decision never officially ever took place but rather than fess up, the ASA will happily release a statment supporting an unauthorised decision by some nonentity that started with them three weeks ago.
His name is Legion for he is many !
GB News did not ban your advert. It just did not accept it.
As you can see for yourself, the adverts on GB News are from a relatively small group of businesses, government adverts, etc., that tend to be repeated over and over, day in and day out, such as that annoying Hoot advert. It is the same on Murdoch’s Talk TV channel. The only difference being that the adverts on GB News tend not to be colonised, whereas the Talk TV adverts are heavily colonised.