Busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers seek­ing to dri­ve online adver­tis­ing sales for small­er clients will be aware that, despite the latter’s tight bud­gets, they’d need to splash out big-time if they want­ed video adver­tis­ing: big, expen­sive agen­cies tend to han­dle that kind of con­tent place­ment. But ris­ing New York bou­tique adver­tis­ing start-up LNC Pro­duc­tions is prov­ing that those days are history.

LNC’s 23-year-old co-founders David Levy (now cre­ative direc­tor) and Eddie Nuvakhov (now pro­duc­tion man­ag­er and CEO) hatched the idea of form­ing a new video com­pa­ny when they met a cou­ple of years ago over a Shab­bat meal. By 2013, they’d built LNC Productions.

Small but savvy

The more quest­ing busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er may be ask­ing how a small cre­ative bou­tique can com­pete with the big beasts in the video adver­tis­ing jun­gle. Levy explains it deft­ly: “It is because of the rel­a­tive ease of Inter­net dis­tri­b­u­tion. It lev­els the play­ing field for the com­pa­nies that don’t have the bud­get to buy TV ads.”

Both agree that TV sim­ply lacks the lev­el of inter­ac­tiv­i­ty offered by mobile and online plat­forms, which can see con­tent go viral with no addi­tion­al cost. And they’re mak­ing head­way: hav­ing only found­ed LNC Pro­duc­tions at the start of 2013, they’d made close to $100,000 in rev­enue by year’s end. And the com­pa­ny has more than $130,000 worth of signed deals in the bag for this year already.

But the oth­er ques­tion curi­ous busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers might now be pos­ing is what the fees are? Fash­ion com­pa­ny Yosi Sam­ra paid just $12,000 for its slot; that com­pares with $50,000 charged by big­ger agencies.

Low cost excellence

LNC can charge such mod­est fees because tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions have set pro­duc­tion costs tum­bling: very ade­quate cam­eras and equip­ment can now be pur­chased from start-up man­u­fac­tur­ers for a frac­tion of the ear­li­er cost, while low-cost cloud com­put­ing has made inter­net col­lab­o­ra­tion and back-up stor­age for huge data reserves a walk in the park.  And small­er com­pa­nies can now afford a slice of the online video action.

As Nuvakhov put it: “We saw this gap in the mar­ket and start­ed the com­pa­ny, regard­less of the inher­ent risks and dif­fi­cul­ty. We saw that for many busi­ness­es an increased impor­tance was attached to their online pres­ence, with video as now an essen­tial require­ment for pub­lic rela­tions success.”