I was contacted on February 26 by Maureen Sperling, VP of New Business Development for a division of Mirage Videl Production offering to do professional quality 30,60 and 120 minute commercials on my 2 products, OdorXit Concentrate and OdorXit Magic. Both products are outstanding from both a price and a performance point of view. Very professional contracts and other legal documents were faxed and need to be signed right away to get my project into the queue for spring production 2006. And of course the $25000 production/management fee had to be received within 30 days or default would result in $17,500 damages and penalties.
The cost of initial airing of the commercial was included in the $25000 and the results of which would determine the viability of running the commercial nationwide on a regular basis.
I was later contacted by Mr Doug Campbell Executive Producer of the Immediate Capitol Group, Inc. To clarify the contract and get it signed. Speed was of the essence. There were lots of people vying for the spring 06 schedule. He even had 4 references sent to belay my concerns of their abilities to acturally write, produce, edit and air a successful commercial. I could only contact 2 of the 6 but the response seem ok.
On April 11 Took Payment in full ($25000) and indicated that production would start in a week or so.
On May 16 I flew to Florida to have a face to face with the writers and production people about what was happening. (nothing!) The meeting seemed to go well but after the meeting I heard nothing at all for months despite phone calls to the participants in the meeting. They were all very busy (dodging).
We finally go a tentative script on October 4 which had only one product featured. The script included all the things I had specifically indicated that I did not want in the commercial so it had to be re-written 2 more times. Additionally, the actual commercial contained a really stupid hard to execute offer which everyone thought was a scam.
By March 19, I finally received a DVD of the commercial that had to be re-shot because of technical issues that should have been caught by the editing process.
Finally, mid summer 2006 (a full year behind schedule and a years interest on the $25000 for the project) the commercial was actually scheduled to show on cable TV channels that might have viewers that have pets or pet issues. Less than half of the scheduled showings actually happened and the 5 or so showings actually netted 9 sales!!!
Efforts to get the showings that where schedules and not shown went of for 2 months and finally were scheduled and again about half actually were shown.
During this process my so called contact person was changed 12 times and each time the previous contacts would not talk to me or return my calls and the new contact know nothing about went on before.
All in all $25000 plus interest, a day trip to Florida, and at least 200 phone calls got me a $50000 debt a pathetic commercial and less than 20 sales.
Needless to say, ID was not interested in perusing the 5% of the sales of the product. HAHA
So if you want to throw away a bunch of money this is a good place to do it.
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