Welcome to another look at award winning radio commercials — spotlighting the good and the bad from the 2007 Radio Mercury Awards. This one was a finalist.
Question: What’s wrong with this radio commercial?
Answer: Everything.
It features one of the most amateurish, incompetent uses of sound effects I’ve ever heard. Those voices are not airline passengers. They’re generic crowd conversation voices.
Why is that important?
Your sounds are supposed to help paint the desired picture in the targeted listener’s mind. That SFX selection doesn’t paint the picture of passengers on an airplane. And the sounds of people screaming? Maybe on a roller coaster, not in a pressured aircraft.
In addition to being the wrong sound effects, they’re utilized — sorry to repeat the adverb, but it’s the most accurate word choice — incompetently.
According to this lame story, the pilot terrifies the passengers by saying he’s going to take a nap. They scream in horror.
But as soon as he cracks the intercom microphone again (but before he speaks), the crowd stops screaming and reverts to its generic, loud multiple conversations. They don’t continue screaming, and they don’t stop talking in order to hear the pilot reassure them that, despite their tremendous fears, he was only kidding.
Even with the inane sound effects, you might have pictured the pilot, perhaps the frightened passengers.
But did you picture yourself buying a lottery ticket? Or your life that has changed for the better because you won the lottery?
Highly unlikely.
The announcer says, “There’s a place for fun & games” and that the Georgia Lottery is “all fun & games.”
Clue #1: People don’t buy lottery tickets because it’s fun.
Clue #2: Ask 1,000 Georgians to list all the games they can think of. Then notice that not one of them includes “lottery” in his or her list.
Clue #3: People buy lottery tickets in the hopes of changing their lives. That concept, however, is nowhere to be found in that stupid airline story.
This was a story about an airline pilot messing with people’s minds — apparently that jerk’s idea of fun & games.
But the announcer tells us the Georgia Lottery is the “place for fun & games.”
So let’s rework the tag line for them, shall we?
“The Georgia Lottery. We’ll mess with your mind.”
Do you really believe that approach sold even a single extra lottery ticket?
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.. and THIS was a finalist?? Who the hell JUDGES those awards? I better be nice… we didn’t win this year.
New York State must’ve hired the same crappy agency. They’re running a lottery spot right now with 45 seconds of dreck and no call to action.
@ Jon: Some states might prohibit specific Calls To Action, e.g., “Buy your ticket today and maybe change your life forever.” (Wouldn’t be a bad Call To Action, actually.)
But even if that’s the case, it wouldn’t excuse (or be the cause of) a terrible commercial.
If this is what passes for an award committee’s idea of an excellent example of radio advertising creative then I guess I might as well give myself a lobotomy… because that’s the only way I could write a commercial that would please that committee.
@John Pellegrini – ha, ha … u just made my morning with the lobotomy bit 😉
True, the ad paints a completely wrong picture in the listener’s head … but hey … this ad WINS awards – this is the only thing that matters to an agency! They build monuments for themselves! These monuments are actually SALES PITCHES to new big clients!
A quick radio ads “smack down” story: we only entered a CREATIVE advertising award festival once in 2005, because we mistakenly understood that creativity must be the twin sister of effectiveness.
We entered a painfully! effective charity radio ads series for a project that blew all our expectations in 2 days!
We somehow persuaded almost 80% of ALL radio stations in our country to give us free advertising. We gave them the spots and they ran them according to our media plan. The results were amazing. Out of this world. Emotional as well as financial results. And after so many years people still remember the emotional ads’ stories.
But hey, RESULTS don’t matter when you have to fill out the application form for this creative advertising award project. And they never will.
Coz the winner of the radio advertising category was this ad:
Female off voice singing in the Marilyn’s style:
“Happy birthday to you …. oh… happy birthday to you … happy birthday Mr. Presideneeent, Happy birthday to youuuuu. Hihihi…
Male off voice: Bar and restaurant Marilyn Monroe offers you the best traditional serbian food, every day from 6pm till 4 a.m. Enjoy the meal!
(yes, there is actually a restaurant called Marilyn Monroe and no I doubt it very much that this ad was mirroring the actual happenings at the restaurant at nights – because they DO NOT have a singer looking or sounding like Marilyn that attracts customers). Plus, can you please tell me what has food got to do with Marilyn?
Ahhh.