A client once asked us point blank how much of their budget should go toward the video itself versus getting people to actually see it. Good question, and most agencies dodge it because the honest answer depends entirely on who’s asking.
If you’re a consumer brand running a paid campaign, most of the money should go to media buying, not production. The video’s job is to get in front of people who’ve never heard of you, and that kind of reach costs real ad dollars. There are plenty of frameworks floating around for this, a 20 percent creative and 80 percent media split shows up a lot. BUT here’s the thing, most of our clients are associations, nonprofits, and federal contractors, not consumer brands chasing cold audiences, and the math looks completely different for that world.
For an association or a nonprofit, the “media” that actually moves a video usually isn’t a paid ad budget at all. It’s a member email list, a conference audience that’s already in the room, a partner organization willing to share it, board members who’ll post it themselves if someone just asks. Those channels cost time and relationships, not ad spend. The real hidden cost here isn’t a line item for media buying, it’s the staff time nobody budgeted for to actually push the video out once it exists.
That’s not an argument against paid promotion entirely. If you’re trying to reach people outside your existing membership or donor base, boosting a post to a targeted audience is worth a modest amount. But chasing a DTC marketing rule built for consumer brands and applying it to an association’s comms budget is a good way to spend real money on ads that nobody in your actual audience needed to see in the first place.
The honest fix is simpler than a budget formula. Before the project starts, ask who’s actually going to push this out and how, your list, your events calendar, your partners, and budget the time for that the same way you’d budget for the shoot itself. A great video with no one assigned to share it is the same problem whether you spent five hundred dollars on ads or fifty thousand.
Working on a video project in the DC area?
We produce social-first video for DC associations, nonprofits, and companies that need to publish consistently. Take a look at our corporate video production work, browse our video production packages, or see how we cover events in Washington, DC. You can also see exactly what it costs on our pricing page, no form required.
