DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

The latest issue of my Radio Advertising Letter includes an article about appropriate criteria for judging a radio advertising competition, as well as a commercial script I wrote for a Japanese restaurant client.

This posting is for subscribers to add their own comments….

It’s not a difficult concept to grasp:

The opening line of a radio commercial is the “commercial for the commercial.” It’s the one chance to grab the attention of the targeted listener.

Whose attention does this opening line attract?

Now, the entire commercial….

Presumably there are some benefits to the discounts Amtrak is offering. Too bad no one ever will become acquainted with those benefits as a result of having this commercial played on a radio near them.

All those times I saw Burns & Schreiber on The Hollywood Palace and The Ed Sullivan Show, it never occurred to me that one day I might actually be friends with Avery Schreiber.

Well, it would be more accurate to say “know Avery Schreiber.” We weren’t buddies, but I suspect Avery became friends with everyone he met.

I first met him when Dick Orkin invited Avery to do a mini-workshop at the very first International Radio Creative & Voiceover Summit in 1996.

A few years later Avery agreed to conduct another workshop at my Morning Show War College.

Avery could create reality out of…air. He sat on a folding chair and asked, “Okay, so whom am I?”

“A truck driver,” said one of the morning jocks.

Bam! We saw that truck. Felt it vibrate, felt the road, felt the gears grinding.

Avery was magical. He also was perhaps the gentlest person I’ve ever met.

Sometime between the Summit and the War College, Avery added me to his list of email friends. I’m guessing it was a long list. He’d send funny stuff to this list of friends. Unlike almost everything else one receives under the guise of “funny email,” it always was funny.

And it always had heart.

It must’ve been when I called him up to ask if he’d speak at the War College that he told me a joke over the phone. In a half-whisper, as a small child. The joke sounded dirty until he got to the punchline, when it turned out to be as innocent as a small child.

Once I bumped into him at a Writer’s Guild screening. We sat next to each other. “I’m watching a movie with Avery Schreiber,” I marveled.

Averyimp, I miss your emails. And your talent. And the world sorely misses your heart.

Radio show prep tips from The Greaseman, Ross Brittain, Gary Burbank, Dan O’Day.

Recorded at my Air Personality Plus+ seminar in Charlotte, North Carolina, 1991.