Yahoo! must have changed advertising agencies since they aired radio commercials that were so good I praised them and held them up in my radio advertising seminars as examples of how to use radio effectively.
Here’s a sample from their latest campaign….
Radio advertising paints pictures.
The pictures you paint are what the listener will remember. Knowing this, you want to paint pictures of the results promised by the product or service.
What pictures do you retain from that commercial? Some kid outside a rock club? (Even that, by the way, is badly done. If he’s outside the arena, why does he sound as though he’s speaking from a recording booth?)
So they use this young man’s voice to paint pictures of…whatever….But when — 18 seconds into the spot — they get around to what Yahoo is trying to sell, they bring in an announcer who attempts to sell it solely with words, without painting any memorable, relevant pictures.
Last year I was hired was to critique radio commercials that were produced by beginners — by people who’d had no training or experience in radio commercial copywriting but who found themselves having to produce spots every day.
Whenever a spot included someone talking about doing something online, invariably there’d be the sound effect of someone typing on a keyboard. Repeatedly I found myself explaining that the listener doesn’t need to hear a typing sound effect in order to picture someone doing something online and that, in fact, the typing usually distracts the listener from the intended message.
But those were beginners I was talking to, so I forgave them.
I don’t forgive whoever produced the mess you just heard.
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I was relieved to hear that YAHOO did not use the FX of a modem connecting!
Why don’t you write about the best radio commercials
@Blogeswari: I do. I write about outstandingly good ones and outstandingly bad ones. Unfortunately, the percentage of “bad” is so much greater than that of “good.”
I’m scared to let you hear my spots. I (and about a half-dozen others I’ve heard) use that same exact keyboard SFX. But at least I used the effect while using a keyboard in the story. Whew!!