Local commercials are a lot of things, but mostly they’re bad. Go to any small-to-medium TV market in America, and you’ll find wooden acting, awful scripts, grade Z production values and a complete lack of self-awareness in local TV spots.

But deep down, they’ve got heart. There’s an earnestness there that can’t be matched by the slickest of Madison Avenue agencies. Local commercials aren’t just people talking to you — they are you. They’re made by your friends, your neighbors, and other folks you run into every single day.

That’s one of the reasons that I fell in love with producing TV spots in a small Southeastern town, and why I continue to do it today. I’m helping connect businesses directly with their customers, with a level of personal contact that was strangely missing from the national spots I worked on.

Along the way, I’ve learned a few things about how to make an effective, cost-conscious commercial. Your local commercial doesn’t have to suck.

For me, it all started when my soon-to-be-wife came to me with a problem. She worked as an advertising representative for the local cable company, and was well aware that their in-house-produced commercials were terrible.

She spent time defending them from Facebook groups that declared how bad the local ads were. It was always half-hearted. God bless her, she tried, but there really was no defense – the ads WERE embarrassingly bad. Even when the concept was brilliant, the execution was lacking.

I can’t lay all of the blame on the cable company’s ad producers. They were often working at or near minimum wage with little training and outmoded gear. The teams of ad reps and editors were hired for selling and making sure the right buttons got pressed, not necessarily for their creativity. Finally, their names weren’t going on the spots, so they didn’t have pride on the line.

Many of the businesses didn’t know any better – they’d never had access to decent production, so they just shrugged their shoulders and took it as it came. Others knew they could get something better, but didn’t want to pay astronomical amounts of money for quality production. And who could blame them? They’re busy keeping their businesses running, not paying attention to the latest trends in advertising.

And sure, there were a couple of other production houses in town, but they were old-school, using gear that was showing its age. By and large, the look and feel of my area’s commercials hadn’t changed much since the 1990s.

So the local options were limited, and that was flatly unacceptable to my wife. Business development is kind of her thing, and she cared deeply for all of her clients.

I’d just talked myself into buying a Canon 5D Mark II, a really nice camera for still photography. At the time, it also had a little add-on feature of being able to shoot video.*

My wife’s my biggest fan, but when she asked me if I could use that fancy new camera to shoot a TV commercial for her, I was scared to death. Me and my brother played around with Dad’s camcorder when we were kids. I’d occasionally held a video camera while working at a newspaper. And here she was, wanting me to put together something that would go on honest-to-God-TV.

I was going in with no experience, no training (I’ve got a music degree), and no idea about the right way to shoot a spot. Or the wrong way.

But I love her, so I shot the commercial. The client accepted that I was flying by the seat of my pants, I somehow muddled through the editing process, and the experience was… pretty great, really.

The results? I can look back on them now and cringe a bit. As much as I’d like to think that my work was head-and-shoulders above everyone else in the area, it wasn’t. My first-ever, lovingly crafted 30 seconds of TV commercial bliss was solidly mediocre.

But I ended up making another one. Then another one. Later that year, I incorporated my own video production business. Now we’ve got employees, a ton of gear, and there’s never enough time in the day to handle all of the commercials, TV shows, corporate videos and institutional projects we have going on.

And I’m happy to say that even though we’re not working on multi-million dollar projects, our work very seldom sucks.

If I could learn how to put out good work and make clients happy, so can you.

*That video feature turned out to be insanely great for its $2,500-range price, making it the go-to for indie filmmakers and even Hollywood productions for years.