DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

This is the third of a 6-part series of Secrets of Radio Advertising.

The More You Tell, The More You Sell.

Here’s how you “tell more” in print advertising:

You give as much information as possible.

You use a “shotgun” approach, attempting to cover as many as bases as possible.

You might throw out 120 different reasons for the consumer to act on the sales message, hoping that one of them hits.

Here’s how you “tell more” in radio advertising:

You spend as much time as possible on your one, single core message.

By core message, I mean the one thing you want your target audience to hear, to understand, and to remember.

One — and only one — core message. Again and again and again and again.

Recently I asked, “What is your radio station’s lemonade moment?”

This year Ken Levine and I had to find a new hotel to host our annual Sitcom Room.

We settled on a small boutique hotel we’d never heard of: The Custom Hotel, not far from Los Angeles International Airport.

Everything about the hotel has a sense of coolness, of fun, of subdued playfulness.

This is in the hotel lobby.

It’s filled with ice water…and strawberries.

An ingenious way to give a surprise gift to hotel guests (and visitors) at virtually no cost to the hotel.

The Custom Hotel is right next to a large supermarket.

I’m guessing that each morning, an employee is dispatched to the supermarket to buy a $2.49 box of strawberries.

Again I ask: What is your radio station’s “lemonade moment” that surprises and delights its listeners/advertisers/sponsors/partners?

This is the second of a 6-part series of Secrets of Radio Advertising.

One of the crucial differences between a radio commercial and a print or Web advertisement:

For the target audience, a radio commercial is a linear experience.

Listeners cannot jump around, looking for something of interest.

Listeners cannot decide to skip the boring beginning and go straight to the last 10 seconds of the message.

Listeners must listen — if they listen at all — in the precise order that the message is presented.

In a newspaper ad, your eyes can jump around; a newspaper ad is not necessarily a linear experience.

Neither, of course, is a well-designed Web page.

Your radio commercial must pull the targeted consumer along, and it must be structured in a way that immediately commands and then keeps the attention of that targeted consumer.

And that is why it is professional malpractice for anyone to simply take the client’s newspaper ad and put it on the air.

Here’s Bruce Scott from KOST-FM/Los Angeles (a Soft AC station).

Being a real personality on a music intensive radio station doesn’t necessarily require a lot of time.

But as Bruce demonstrates, it helps if you have a personality.