Television commercial donut - Definition and Overview

A television commercial donut is basically a television commercial with a hole in the middle. It contains all the specialized elements necessary to create a finished commercial, but does not contain any specific product, pricing, logos, etc.

Purpose

Traditionally, high quality commercial television advertising has been very expensive and time consuming. As a result many advertisers have chosen to take advantage of the "free" or low cost production offered by many cable stations in exchange for purchasing air-time. Because most of these stations do profit from the actual production, it is not in their interests to go to the extra expense of producing custom 3D artwork and animations for these commercials. As a result many "local" commercials do not look very appealing compared to the national chains. Television commercial donuts allow for inexpensive customization by local cable/televison stations by providing the custom artwork in a editable form.