Nine years ago, my office manager began a campaign to convince me to get TiVo. This, of course, was before DVRs were standard features of cable TV and satellite dish providers.
Back then, almost everyone used videotape to record television programs. TiVo, on the other hand, digitally records television programs onto a hard drive.
For two years, she tried in vain to convert me to TiVo (of which she was an early adopter).
“It will record any program for you,” she enthused.
“My VCR does that,” I replied.
“Yes, but then you can watch whatever it’s recorded, whenever you want,” she said.
“Same with my VCR.”
“You don’t understand!” she wailed. “It completely changes your television viewing experience!”
And that’s exactly why I wasn’t interested in Tivo: I had no desire to change my television viewing experience. My television viewing experience was not a problem to me.
One day I had lunch with a friend. He’d just gotten Tivo.
“So,” I ventured, “what’s it like?”
“Oh, it’s great!” he said. “It completely changes your television viewing experience!”
Here we go again.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I never have to channel surf any more.”
That surprised me. My friend has a pretty busy career, and I didn’t think he had time to sit on the sofa, flipping through channels.
“So you used to just sit there with the remote control, trying to stumble upon something to watch?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “What I mean is that now whenever I turn on the TV, there’s always something I want to watch.”
Hmmm. Have you ever had the problem of feeling like watching TV but not finding anything worth viewing?
A week later I went to Best Buy and bought TiVo. Which I still use.
The Radio Advertising Lesson
1. Identify a desire that will be fulfilled or a problem that will be solved by your client’s product or service.
2. Show the consumer how you can fulfill his desire or solve her problem.
3. Deliver your message in a way that involves the listener.
4. Make sure your message is absolutely clear…which, among other things, means not allowing anything in the commercial that distracts from that single clear message.
5. Drive home that message again and again again, using one of radio’s great strengths: Frequency. (When I say “frequency,” am not referring to your dial position.)
Comments on this entry are closed.
The is the corollary to your lesson, Dan.
Radio can be time shifted, too. It changes the listening experience and so both program content and advertising content have to be adapted to this new audio paradigm. We can fast forward through radio now, too.