DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

You’re an audiobook narrator. You’ve paid your dues and learned your craft, but your career isn’t doing as well as you’d like.

Why not?

Is it due to bad luck?

Is there an industry-wide conspiracy against you?

No.

The problem is you’ve bought into the idea that the only way to get work is to audition for as much stuff as you can…and hope that someone hires you.  

Registration for my Aikido Self Promotion for Audiobook Narrators has closed.

I’ll be glad to let you know if and when I decide to teach the class again. Just enter your name and email address into this charming blue box:

Recently a friend asked me if I had a list of Best Practices for radio advertising copywriters, for him to share with a client.

I didn’t have a formal list, so I told him I’d write whatever came to my mind, in the order it came to me.

No editing. No explaining. No justifying.

Just an incomplete, bare bones list of many of the elements required of a successful radio commercial.

The Quick, Incomplete “Best Practices” for Radio Advertising Copywriters

* The goal of a radio commercial isn’t to entertain; it’s to sell.

* The opening line of a radio spot is the commercial for the commercial.

It’s your one chance to attract the attention of your target audience.

* Single Core Message

Your Radio Spot’s Call to Action

* Don’t give your Call to Action until you’ve made the listener really want what you’re offering.

* If your Call to Action is to call a phone number, giving the number more than twice is an indication that you haven’t given listeners a strong enough reason to call.

* If your Call to Action is to call a phone number, it goes at or near the end of the spot.

* Who told you you never should begin a commercial with a question?

* Single Call to Action When you give people a choice of actions (e.g., “Call us or go to our website,”) you generate fewer responses than you would with a single, strongest Call to Action.

Why?

Choice Paralyzes Response.

Communicating to Your Targeted Radio Listeners

* Who told you you never should begin a commercial with a question?

* Speak the language your target audience speaks.

* Average American conversational speech: 3 words per second (90 words per :30, 180 words per :60).

3 words per second isn’t your goal; it’s a rule-of-thumb to determine the maximum number of words you should use in a typical commercial.

A well-written commercial usually requires fewer than 90 or 180 words. What to Say and How To Say It in Your

* Squeezing in more words by digitally speeding up the commercial is a good way to let people know the commercial was created by an amateur.

* Don’t talk about yourself (i.e., you, the advertiser). Nobody cares.

* When you speak in clichés, you give people permission not to listen.

* When you have someone pretend to be a customer, the audience can hear it, and they realize you’re lying to them.

* Present the information from the listener’s point of view.

* Radio Advertising Solves Problems. Talk to listeners about the problem you’re going to solve for them.

* The pictures your commercial paints in the listeners’ minds are what they’ll remember.

* “Visit Us Online” is a stupid thing to say.

If your Call to Action is to get the listener to go to your website, it should be either to get something or to do something.

No one wants to visit you online.

* Use music in a commercial only if it enhances the emotional impact of the spot.

* You don’t get a radio commercial by holding a brochure up to a microphone.

* Give people a reason to buy.

* Anticipate objections and overcome them in your commercial.

* Other than food, water and shelter, your listeners don’t have “needs.”

Here’s yet another example of a worthless radio campaign that accomplishes only one thing: It completely wastes the advertiser’s money.

The spot begins, “This is a radio ad for the first-ever BMW X2.”

The Sole Job of a Radio Commercial’s Opening Line

The opening line of your radio commercial is the “commercial for the commercial.”

Its sole purpose is to motivate the target audience to listen to the spot’s next line.

Did that opening line make you want to continue to listen?

Also, of course, it begins by telling listeners that they’re now hearing a “radio ad”…

…thereby relieving the audience of the frustration of noticing that suddenly they’re no longer hearing the station’s programming but instead to some mysterious sound.

After all, there’s no other way listeners would know that was a radio commercial.

In keeping with the tradition of “radio commercials for area car dealer associations,” a generic, meaningless, guitar-laden repetitive music bed accompanies the entire spot.

If the Music Doesn’t Enhance the Emotional Impact of the Spot or Somehow Enhance the Commercial’s Sales Message, the Music Shouldn’t Be There.

Slapping a generic rock-ish music bed under the announcer’s voice doesn’t qualify as “producing a radio commercial.”

The only thing that music bed does is compete with the announcer’s voice for the listener’s attention.

“Should I try to listen to that crappy music, or should I try to listen to the announcer’s droning voice talk about something or other?”

The ad attempts to speak to “millennials.”

Why, then, did the ad agency choose music that has just as little appeal to millennials as it does to any other demographic?

Criticizing the Spot’s Word Choice Is Like Criticizing the Color Scheme of the Titanic, But…

The spot refers to the people it’s trying to attract as “unfollowers.”

In today’s social media-dominated world, what does “unfollowers” mean to you?

A) The people who influence the influencers (as the commercial declares)

B) People who chase instincts instead of trophies (as the commercial declares)

C) (Your real answer goes here.)

What they mean is “non-followers.”

They’re trying to express the concept of “someone who doesn’t follow the crowd.”

An “unfollower” is someone who had been a follower and then stopped being a follower.

“Non-followers” would be no more effective than “unfollowers,” but at least it wouldn’t be inane.

And what does it mean for someone to “chase instincts”?

Instincts don’t need to be chased.

Instincts are right there inside you.

Kind of, y’know, instinctively.

I could continue to dissect this commercial, but I’m feeling the urge to “chase nausea.”

So I’ll conclude with the biggest mistake that spot makes.

A mistake that reveals a fatal ignorance of how effective radio advertising works.

What the Listeners Pictures is What the Listener Will Remember.

The creators of that BMW radio ad rely solely on the announcer’s voice to deliver the sales message.

The spot creates, at most, just one mental image:

Some guy talking into a microphone.

Ask targeted listeners what that guy was talking about and they’ll respond, “Uh, I dunno. A car or something?”

The Advertiser Received Absolutely No Benefit from that Radio Commercial.

Terrible copywriting.

Poor production.

Utter failure to generate visual images that carry to the listener the intended sales message.

On the other hand, radio stations got paid to air the spot.

And someone, somewhere, got paid to create it.

So at least it worked out well for them.

In response to my recent critique of a Mercedes radio commercial, a Loyal Reader asked:

“Dan, why do you think major manufacturers actually sign off on stuff as bad as this?”

That kind of advertising has no accountability.

There’s no way for the company to know what effect, if any, the campaign is having on consumers.

That, of course, is how most large ad agencies want it.

“Did the client like it?” is a much easier question to answer than “Did that campaign make them money, or did it cost them money?”

How does an advertising agency avoid accountability?

Easy.

By telling the client it’s a “branding” campaign.

Almost all large companies create an annual budget that allocates a specific percentage of their advertising dollars to radio.

They don’t determine that percentage based on the profitability of radio advertising in the previous year, because they don’t know whether or not it was profitable.

Often the determination of what percentage of the ad budget will be spent on radio is, “What per cent did we give radio last year?”

Radio advertising is a lot cheaper than television or online video advertising.

Advertising agencies are paid a percentage of a campaign’s production costs.

Even the most elaborate radio commercial costs infinitely less than a network TV commercial.

15% of a pittance doesn’t do much for the agency’s bottom line.

At a large, full service agency, radio copywriting isn’t a priority.

“The guy who writes the radio stuff” is at the bottom of the creative ladder.

That guy probably has no real-world education in writing radio copy.

After all, it’s so easy, isn’t it?

That guy probably has no track record in creating profitable, results-producing radio spots.

That person was hired based upon his/her ability to write “clever” copy, not copy that sells.

Most large, full service advertising agencies have little interest in and give little thought to their radio campaigns.

Often the advertiser’s “radio campaign” is nothing more than the audio track to their new TV commercial.

At the last minute, someone says, “What about radio?”

The answer used to be for the agency to FedEx the audio track to radio stations across the country, arriving on the Friday before the Monday when the spot was scheduled to begin airing.

The Internet, of course, has made it much easier for an ad agency to distribute audio files to radio stations around the world…

…on the Friday before the Monday when the spot is scheduled to begin airing.

Years ago, in my Radio Advertising Letter, I talked about the practice of “sending them the audio track from the TV spot at the last minute.”

One subscriber, who worked at an ad agency, lambasted me for my ignorance.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said in an email to me.

“If you’re so ignorant that you believe that ever happens, take me off your damn list.”

It’s possible that at least one radio production director who is reading this can verify that, indeed, sometimes that’s exactly what happens.

In many markets, a company’s automobile dealers band together to run their own advertising.

They kick in some money and the auto manufacturer contributes, too.

The Local (Manufacturer) Dealers association turns to the advertising agency they’ve used for years.

Their only criterion: The commercials should be entertaining to the ears of the local car dealers, who of course are experts at recognizing what their customers will find to be entertaining on the radio.

The client knows nothing about radio advertising, so they rely on the agency’s presumed expertise.

“After all, that’s what we’re paying them for.”

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