The $5 commercial: what it costs to make an ad, and why that number had to fall

Producing a traditional broadcast-grade commercial costs between $3,000 and $20,000. That figure is not padding. It is camera crews, lighting rigs, actors, a sound engineer, a location, and an editor who bills by the day.

What the price actually buys

Strip a commercial down and you are paying for six decisions: how the story is paced, how the set looks, who is in it, how it sounds, how the camera moves, and how it is cut together. Everything else on the invoice is the logistics of getting human beings into a room to make those six decisions.

Optiq Studio removes the logistics and keeps the decisions. Five specialist agents each own one of them, which is why the output holds together instead of looking like a prompt-generated slideshow.

Who this changes things for

Millions of Gambians are online every single day. So are millions of Nigerians, Senegalese and Ghanaians. The customers were never the missing piece. The ad was.

• A bakery that can now show the bread coming out of the oven instead of describing it.
• A tailor whose work photographs badly but films beautifully.
• A mechanic whose entire competitive advantage is trust, which is very hard to convey in a static post.