In message ,
Martin Angove wrote:

In message ,
Rod wrote:

Missed a couple of minutes of tonight's Gloucester lawyers prog. So I went
to the GD website and was astonished to see even the supplier of
"Tolietries (small bathroom)" (sic) credited. This suggests that the people
who appear can scrounge all sorts of stuff 'for the publicity'.

No big surprise but it set me wondering. Assuming that they get some sort
of appearance/co-operation fee from GD - how much can you make, all in, by
being filmed?


Dunno, but when my sis and bro' in law contacted Property Ladder, there
was no fee from the programme makers involved; though they did promise a
bottle and a copy of the programme on tape. I suspect that with the
proliferation of this sort of programme most suppliers wouldn't do
anything too special. If I had the chance of working on a building while
being filmed, I wouldn't offer any special deals because if you get on
camera at all, it's for two or three seconds, they usually say something
like "and the bill for the electrics is twice as high as expected" and
even if your logo is emblazoned across all available area of your shirt,
it's rarely seen for long enough or clear enough to make an impact.


Just realised that the obvious exceptions to this were both Grand
Designs programmes: the one about the Huff Haus which spent the whole
programme talking about these fantastic Germans and their brilliant
system (but Huff have a huge waiting list, so they hardly need to offer
incentives for extra publicity), and the one about that girl with the
funny name (Melody?) and her bloke who built an "experimental" half
oak-framed house. Not so many mentions, but not difficult to work out
that said girl's daddy runs Border Oak who designed and built the house
and so there would have been *loads* of freebies available, not only for
family reasons, but also because of the mentions in the programme and
the articles in the magazines (it was definitely in Homebuilding and
Renovating, and I *think* I saw it in Self Build & Design too).

On the other side of the argument, I saw a DIY SOS last night; it was at
completely the other end of the scale; "here are Bill and Ben" (or
whatever their names were). "They are hand crafting this lovely oak
kitchen..." but not a mention of the supplier's name. Probably on the
website, though I haven't checked.

Hwyl!

M.

--
Martin Angove: http://www.tridwr.demon.co.uk/
Two free issues: http://www.livtech.co.uk/ Living With Technology
.... Blessed are the Greeks