You’ve heard me say this before: Award-winning radio commercials rarely are good commercials. They are radio commercials that entertain the judges.
But maybe you haven’t heard lots of “award winners” and you’re not sure I’ve been telling you the truth. So let’s visit a number of spots honored as “the best of the best” by the 2007 Radio Mercury Awards.
As I selected commercials to share with you, I followed just one criterion: Was there something about the spot that stood out? Sometimes — okay, rarely — that something that stood out made it an effective commercial. More often, an entry stood out because it was so staggeringly bad.
You be the judge.
That’s a very clever idea, megaphone manufacturer employees all speaking through megaphones.
But….
They didn’t test this spot by listening to it over a car radio in traffic; much of it simply cannot be understood under noisy road conditions.
Also, the only picture that’s painted is this company in which everyone talks into a megaphone. But there’s no picture of the solution —the results — that FedEx offers. Nothing.
They could have tagged anything onto the end of this. They could have said, “We need to advertise more” or “We need to put up billboards.”
Here Comes The Clue Train
If you can replace the advertiser with any other advertiser without weakening the spot, your commercial might entertain. It might win awards. But it won’t make money for the advertiser.
It’s a clever conceit, but it’s poorly executed in terms of thinking about the end user’s (listener’s) experience, and it does a terrible job of demonstrating the results it actually is supposed to be selling.
But it won an award for BBDO New York.
Hey, guess what? The “Chief Judge” of that year’s awards is a “Chief Creative Officer” of BBDO New York.
Golly, a Chief Creative Officer of an agency that produces entertaining crap like this — that couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that so many patently terrible commercials are honored. Could it?
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Totally on the mark Dan!
You can always tell which agencies will win the big awards each year based on who from their staff is on the judging panel.
I always have to laugh at the local addy winners in my market. I know for a fact each year that the ads that win have never done anything to increase or even maintain the client’s bottom line. And more often than not the agencies responsible for those award winning ads lose the account at the end of the year.
How true. And there are so many examples. There’s a radio advert that won a Cannes ad award last year, and a Golden Pencil from an agency here in South Africa. Everyone was so impressed. And it was awful. First off it was a minute and 13 seconds in length, and I don’t know anyone who books that type of airtime here, and secondly the client was just a tag at the end. As for frequency, it was just so annoying you would turn it off if you heard it again. The adverts that win awards are rarely the ones that are sales effective for the client, and are usually flighted at midnight, once off, when the airtime is cheap and so they can fulfill the criteria on their admission form to say: “It was flighted”
Was it effective?
No.
Would I still like to win an award….(shamefully)yeah.
But maybe from Dan O Day.
Idea maybe? Let us regularly submit our best work that we do anyway, and the one that catches your attention Dan wins a pat on the back from you?
I wonder whether and how FedEx actually measures the effectiveness of the ad in question. It’s conceivable (if barely) that they saw an increase in business tied to running that spot.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that their marketing people determined that the ad did “work.” The issue would then be good vs. better, not simply good or bad, right?
Many award-winning ads fail to ring the cash register.
Many ads that win at the register will never receive an advertising award.
But sometimes – hopefully more often, as a result of learning from folks like Dan – a radio commercial can be both entertaining and effective.