Most radio advertising salespeople have been taught to sell “The Immediacy of Radio.”
But they’ve been completely misinformed as to what that “immediacy” actually means.
They’ve been taught to equate “immediacy” with, “Give us the copy — or just the order — this afternoon, and we’ll get it on the air tomorrow morning.”
That is not what “the immediacy of radio” means.
The concept of “the immediacy of radio” comes from the fact that radio can cover news as it happens.
It dates back to the days when if some major event occurred, people would automatically turn on the radio because they could learn about that event as it unfolded. They didn’t have to wait until the next day’s newspaper to find out what happened.
If you’re over the age of 40, when you were growing up and you heard about some big news story and wanted to get the details immediately, what did you do? You turned on the radio.
Unfortunately for Radio, CNN changed all that.
“The immediacy of radio” never meant, “Give us the order today and we’ll put you on the air tomorrow.”
But most radio salespeople have been taught otherwise, and they in turn have led their clients to expect almost instant turnaround on their copy.
Why is that bad for Radio and bad for advertisers?
If you routinely accept an order at 4 o’clock in the afternoon for airing the next morning, you are doing two things:
1. You are virtually guaranteeing the client does not get his or her money’s worth, because you are not allowing enough time to do a professional job of creating the advertising.
Yes, you can write, produce and air a new commercial within 24 hours. Or within 24 minutes.
If you manage a radio station and allow that to occur, then you are contributing to radio’s small percentage of most advertising budgets and to the all-too-common complaint, “I tried radio, and it didn’t work.”
2. You are training your clients to think of radio as a “last-minute” medium of last resort, rather than as the powerful advertising medium that it can be when used properly.
Tomorrow: I solve the age-old problem of “getting the salespeople to turn in their copy orders on time.”
Really.
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Amen, Dan. This sort of mindset encourages assembly-line production. Sure, “we’ll crank it out and get it on” usually means pretty generic/old/tired copy & concept. Some jock or over-worked Creative Services guy rips through it and it’s on… but, it’s either ordinary or corny. Fast is nice but not if it’s done simply for the sake of speed.
I remember, early in my career, I did a morning show at a small market station and also, among the 27 other things I did after I got off the air, I did traffic and continuity. The fact that I went home at 3:30 in the afternoon used to make the salespeople crazy because they couldn’t submit an order at 4:45 to be on the air the next day. I have no idea how many times I walked into the building in the wee small hours of the morning to find a reel of tape laying on the console to be dubbed or worse a spot to be produced before I went on the air at 6:00.
This used to frustrate me to no end. Rip & run is painful to a creative who takes pride in his/her work.
I find it highly ironic that you talk about the ‘immediacy’ of radio when 95% of all radio stations use that lame crutch called voice-tracking. =)
I think you’ve landed on the biggest problem causer between the sales and production departments. The belief that radio’s biggest asset is to crank out crap-ola quickly hurts in so many different ways…no the least of which being it drags you away from the work you’re doing for clients that had the foresight to plan ahead. Anyone that thinks their doing the client a favor with churn and burn spots needs to rethink their career choice.
I read your thread about getting copy on right away and what that implies. Sometimes no matter how hard we try to get them to think and plan ahead they still get copy to us at the last minute. But hopefully although the decision may be last minute it doesn’t mean the copy was put together haphazardly.
And then there are those radio sales reps who always promise the “immediacy” of results for their new advertisers, while taking an order for a 1-month, low-budget trial run…