A worked example
₹12,00,000 across a teaser and a trailer.
This is how we would spend it, not a campaign we have run. Every figure below is an allocation — how the budget is divided, how many versions go in, when decisions are made. There are no results on this page: no cost per view, no install counts, no reach. Keyart has not run a client campaign yet, and inventing the numbers from one would be the easiest thing on this website to do and the last thing worth doing. When there is a real one, it will appear under Work with the client's name and their permission on it.
The other one ₹3,00,000 · 21 days · one push
Before day one
Why the money is split unevenly
Thirty per cent to the teaser, sixty to the trailer, ten held back for the last week. The teaser phase is not a smaller version of the trailer phase — it is partly buying something the trailer phase will use.
₹3,60,000 · teaser phase, days 1–20
Enough to reach widely and to find the angles, but deliberately not the bulk of the budget: the teaser is the cheapest place to be wrong.
₹7,20,000 · trailer phase, days 21–38
The majority, spent when there is a trailer to show and an audience already identified to show it to.
₹1,20,000 · the last week
Held back on purpose. The days closest to release are the most expensive and the most valuable, and a budget fully committed on day thirty cannot use them.
The gap
What carries over, and what is thrown away
Between the phases there is a short period with little spend and a lot of decisions. You get the teaser-phase report before the trailer money moves.
The angles that worked survive; the cuts do not
What transfers is the idea that held attention, rebuilt from trailer footage. Re-running teaser creative against people who already saw it is how a campaign fatigues before its most important fortnight.
You approve the second phase before it runs
With the first phase’s numbers in front of you. If the honest reading is that the material is not landing, this is the point to change the plan rather than the point to spend ₹7,20,000.
The audience list is checked, not assumed
A teaser that reached people who will not book a ticket has built a list worth less than it looks. We would rather say so here than quietly retarget it.
Days twenty-one to thirty-eight
The trailer phase, opening warm
₹7,20,000, moved nightly by the same six rules. The difference from a single-push campaign is that it does not start cold — the first days talk to people who have already watched something of this film.
Warm first, then wide
The teaser audience is reached first, because they are the cheapest people to convince. Broad targeting opens alongside and takes over as that list is used up.
Rotation matters more here
Over eighteen days at this spend, creative fatigue is the main thing that will go wrong. Fresh variants of the winning angles are queued before they are needed rather than made in a hurry when performance drops.
City-level budget actually moves
At this budget the per-city differences are large enough to act on, and the nightly rebalance acts on them instead of reporting them afterwards.
The last week, and after
The reserve, and the record
₹1,20,000 into the days immediately around release, then both phases arrive as one report that can be read against the plan agreed on day zero.
The reserve is spent on evidence, not instinct
By day thirty-eight there are five weeks of data about which angle, which city and which platform converts. The reserve goes there.
Two phases, one record
Spend, results and cost per result for each phase separately and together, so the question "was the teaser worth it" has an answer rather than an opinion.
The fee is not in these numbers
Everything above is ad budget, which goes from you to the platforms. Our fee is separate and is on the pricing page, generated from the published rate card. At this budget the fixed-fee option is usually the cheaper of the two, and we will tell you that.
The honest part
What this example cannot tell you
Whether two phases are worth it for your release. They are not always: a teaser needs something worth teasing, and a phase spent on footage that does not land leaves you with a smaller trailer budget and an audience list of people who were not interested. If the material is thin we will say so and recommend putting everything behind one push instead — the twenty-one day example is what that looks like.