Comments Answered!

Anonymous asked as a comment to yesterday's blog, "i was wondering, do you get paid well to do commercials? no exact number needed of course, just curious."

Well anonymous, the answer to your question is: it depends. The way payment generally works is that you are paid an hourly wage for the first eight hours of work, time and a half for the next four and double time after that. The hourly wage is set as scale and is determined by the union. (SAG) You are only guaranteed the hourly rate for the hours you work, the residual payments are paid if and when the commercial airs. Some commercials never run if the campaign is abandoned, some commercials run for a day but then offend a certain demographic and get pulled, and others run 24/7.

The ones that run often make a lot of money for the actors and director. Also, if the company puts the spot on the Internet, there is a flat rate for that in addition to residuals and at the beginning of every 13 weeks the actors, director, etc are paid a holding fee equal to what they made for the days of shooting. The reason for this is that if you are in a Pepsi commercial, you may not do a commercial for coke as long as you are on "hold" with Pepsi. Right now since I did a commercial for T-Mobile, I am on hold with them as long as they choose to run and pay me for the commercial and I am not aloud to do a commercial for any other cell phone company.

Some actors make a living doing commercials while they wait for their breaks, others do it as a career. Some get lucky and become spokespeople for companies (IE the Verizon guy) and then they can negotiate their own contracts and higher pay.

If they are doing a good job at auditions, statistically actors book about every 40th commercial they go out for because commercials are often about a look and there are so many actors who are generally competing for between 1 and 12 roles. Despite this statistic, a friend of mine has 3 national spots running right now, one for Oscar Meyer, one for Burger King and one for an insurance company. Also, I booked the first thing I went out for!

Generally, commercials are a crap shoot you can make anywhere from $570 dollars to $200,000 depending on how often and for how many years they run your spot.