You cannot “become” a low cost company, you “are born low cost”, the perfect example is given by TVLowCost, the 1st TV advertising agency network.

Many traditional “high cost” advertising agencies believe that they just have to reduce their prices to be competitive in front of us… but this is not very efficient, and they usually fail to impress clients, who rapidly understand that this was just a “trick” to attract them. Because you cannot claim to be a “low cost advertising agency” like that.

I remember a conversation I had a few months ago with the CEO of EASYJET when he said to me that to “one cannot decide to become a low cost company, one must be born low cost” in order to be succesfull and profitable in the long term. All winners in the low cost industry started from zero, this is a clear prerequisite condition.

When we launched the first TVLowCost agency in Paris in october 2004, we started from a blank page and build our company from scratch. We had the unique opportunity to build our business model with no staff, no big salaries, no big rent, no company cars, no retirement plan, no splendid headquarter, no parent company in the Stock Exchange, no “bad habits”… Thus, we were able to really determine a complete new way of approaching TV advertising with no “weight over our shoulders”!

3 years and a half after, we are in 11 countries managing 110 clients and winning every month new clients to help them save spectacularly on their marketing and advertising costs, we have produced 450 TV qualitative spots at a cost that our industry believed impossible to reach, just because we broke all the usual rules of this very “high cost” industry. We have demonstrated hundred of times that the “prime time” dictature was the best way to waste money when day time and night time spots where far more efficient for 4/5 times less money than the usual media planning strategies. We have demonstrated that TV advertising could be both very affordable and still the most economical and efficient media when so many people complain about it. It is the way traditional advertising agencies and media agencies use TV which is no more efficient, not the media in itself!

The success of TVLowCost is not a surprise, it is the way traditional agencies continue to be so “high cost” which is so surprising!