There Ought To Be A Law

There are some things that our advertisers do that are illegal and then there are others that should be.

In both situations, it's the listener who gets punished when programmers fail to police these instances even before a fine comes the radio station's way.

Things every creative director needs to be on the lookout for every day:

1.  End dates for copy.  Nothing sounds less "live and local" than a spot for a Thanksgiving Day Sale on the day after the holiday.

2.  Updates.  Every time-dated spot or promo must have a "tomorrow" and "today" version.  Would anyone tell a friend "sale ends November 20th" ON November 20th?

3.  Sirens.  No, it's not illegal to broadcast one on radio, but has anyone not been in a vehicle when one came on, felt deceived after pulling over to the side of the road, realizing they could have caused an accident?  Surely, there's a more original and creative way to command attention than this hackneyed gimmick.  Let's protect the ears and traffic safety of our listener and offer to make something better for the brand, gratis.

4.  "The first listener to get to (remote location) wins..."  Actually, this one could get you sued if someone causes a collision after speeding up to get your prize.

5.  Anything that contains "prize, chance and consideration."  But, you knew that. 

I wish we'd handle numbers 1 through 3 as strictly as we do that one by using the phrase "I can't let you do that."

Quality Is As Important As Quantity

Irritating commercials are becoming an increasing cause of listener tune-out. 

The quality of the commercials is more of a potential tune-out than the quantity.

Today, the greatest missed opportunity in radio is to produce spots that are clever, ear catching, compelling for listeners to hear and compelling enough to move product for the client. 

When it comes to local “in house” spot production we turn out a lot of “average” spots. A trend as winning operators consolidate is to have a full time production person who does nothing but sharpen the production images for all of the companies properties. 

If I were a General Manager, I would invest more in a Creative/Production department.  I would want to have better spots to lead off my spotsets and create demand in my station’s creative department.

 

Be known for great production.  Your TSL will go up (ratings) and make your station in demand for production (revenues)!

Radio Advertiser? Don't Waste Your Money.

Heard at The Conclave:  Tim Burt maintains that only one percent of all radio ads really work to convince and get results.

His tips to use with your clients to be certain that they get more than they expect from their investment:

1. As you refine their message ("a radio commercial is a business card, not a brochure") ask them "why shouldn't I go to your competition."
2. Challenge them to think about their spot as if they had :15-:30 seconds to talk to the crowd at the largest stadium in your town.  Would they say "open Friday night till 9 at our convenient location, stop in or call or visit our website"?
3. Have them take "the competitor script challenge."  Replace their direct competition's name in their ad and talk about whether their ad is the same as the guy across the street except for the brand name in it.  ("if you were lost in a forest, would you dress up like a tree?")

Make sure the communication contains ONE core, easily understood message, the element of surprise, an undeniable, irrefutable fact (results), exudes safety/trust and tells a story, ending with the principle of closure.

You Need A Station "Results Manager"

No one wants irritating, ineffective commercials on the air.

So, how do they get there?

If you agree with me that many of the spots your station airs cost time spent listening by causing tune-out and thus aren't effective in actually marketing anything (other than building brand name familiarity by associating the retailer or product for a repetitive negative memory), it's time to review the process which allows that to happen.

Theory:  sales person closes the deal and is told that the commercials will arrive via email, snail mail or ftp site. 

The lone person in the building all night, watching over all of the stations in the cluster is charged with doing the "dubs" based on a production order from traffic.

Quality control is most likely no one person's responsibility, other than - hopefully - the all nighter is cautioned to flag anything that might be illegal, such as one that contains "prize, chance and consideration."

It's time for a more specific policy designed to at least call someone's attention to what could be an offensive, poorly-produced, badly-written commercial.

1.  Have everyone who is charged with loading a spot into the system code each one with a letter grade from "A" to "F" and compare the scheduled run dates with the copy to be sure that it won't sound out-dated.

2.  Create a "customer results manager" position, hopefully one of your most detail-oriented and creative people, to review anything with a "C" grade or lower and also any copy that may require updates toward the end of its run.

3.  When your new "CRM" finds something that needs improvement, that person alerts the seller, who calls the client and asks "are you getting the expected results now that your commercials are running?"

4.  If the client says "yes," tell him about the need for an update and offer ideas to improve the impact and power of the message.  If the client is pleased with things as they are, I do not recommend rocking the boat, but if the advertiser is open to listening to alternative ideas from your creative team take the opening to impress 'em with your caring and follow-through.

They'll call it terrific, above and beyond, customer service.

Have your "CRM" create a discrepancy report with an overview of these actions to be reviewed by Brand Manager, Sales Manager and Market Manager.  You'll smile each time you hear their "new" commercial.  Ratings go up.

Better creative gets better results.  Once your client tells you that you improved her business, that's a perfect opportunity to ask for a hike in rate, don't you think?

More money for everybody!

Three Things About Radio Commercials We Can Agree On

• Commercial free hours beat hours which contain irritating commercials hands down.
• Radio programmers make bad grocery store managers/media buyers, and the reverse is true too.
• Radio can always use more entertaining, creative commercials. (click to hear a bunch of them, presented their trophies and cash just last evening), including the big winner.
  

Need Some Commercial-Creation Inspiration?

Sixty diverse Radio spots (listen to them here) have made it to the finals of the 2010 Radio Mercury Awards, which honors outstanding Radio created by agencies, production companies, Radio stations and students. Entries were judged on their creativity, originality and effective communication of a brand’s message. The second Annual Radio Creative Summit was once again held in conjunction with the final round judging, this year at the VCU BrandCenter in Richmond, Virginia.

“We’re continuing to see marketers leverage Radio in unique ways. This year’s high caliber of brands speak to the medium’s reach and flexibility” -- Jeff Haley, President and CEO of the Radio Advertising Bureau.

Winners will be announced on Monday, September 27th at the Annual Radio Mercury Awards at the NASDAQ MarketSite. A limited amount of tickets are available for purchase. Contact mercury@rab.com or call 212-681-7207.

Making Your TV Spots More Effective

New research by Harvard Business School Professor Thales S. Teixeira purportedly offers a simple and inexpensive solution to help marketers hold on to consumer eyeballs during television commercial breaks.

"The days when you could tell a consumer what to do are long gone," says Teixeira. "In the 1960s, the brand was onscreen all the time with a direct message: 'Drink a Coke,' for instance. Today, people are searching for valuable information that is relevant to them. They also want to be entertained, and the 'hard sell' that turns them off can be at the level of simply presenting the brand's logo for more than a few seconds."

Using their findings as a basis for editing commercials, Julia Hanna writes that Teixeira and his coauthors show that "pulsing" repeated, brief images of the brand can significantly reduce the likelihood that viewers will zap it, as opposed to showing the brand for long periods of time at the beginning or end of the ad.

• Viewers' attention should be managed as any other scarce resource.
• Repeating or "pulsing" brief images of a brand can significantly reduce the likelihood that viewers will zap it.
• Altering commercials to mimic a pulsing strategy is a virtually cost-free fix for a significant payoff.
  

"The dilemma is that our findings show that brand images cause people to zap," Teixeira says. "But they're a necessary evil; without the brand, viewers can't identify what is being sold. So how do you make an ad that includes the brand without causing a high level of zapping?"

The radio equivalent of that, of course, is finding a way to pair your brand with an emotion, and it always has seemed to me that it's a big mistake to produce an entertaining spot that just tags your brand on for a few seconds at the very end.

"Sometimes advertisers say that they're creative and can't be constrained by science or academic research," he says. "But this isn't really a constraint, and our results show that it can help advertisers achieve the goal of getting their message out to more people."

Can They Really Make Radio Say “Sex” And “Rape”?

...I hope not, since not only are broadcasters responsible to community needs, good programmers work hard to build a large audience so that advertisers trust us to get them more results than what they expected.

It would be nice to think that in Pennsylvania a very good cause is using the request for a change in their copy to get more publicity than the actual ads would get and you sure can’t blame them for that as long as once everything dies down more reasonable heads prevail and ultimately make everyone involved, including B-101 listeners, "feel good."

Meanwhile, ironically, ad wizard Roy Williams has also recently been on a tear about buyers and agencies having the right to super-saturate radio with annoying ads.

I’ll permit Williams a bit of slack since I am a longtime "beagle" of the wiz, but it is possible that he’s been hearing from PPM market stations he'd like to buy, informing him that running the same piece of copy, intentionally written to irk, several times per hour is damaging both his and the stations' interests.

He wants to buy radio and control the creative in the same very successful way he has used to get clients outstanding results for many years, and you can’t blame him for that.

Metered behavior, however, is now giving us information that would be foolish for a competitive programmer to ignore. Some commercials, for example, lose as much as 40% of the audience within the first seconds. And, when the average listener leaves for another station, it typically takes more than 45 minutes for them to come back.

The tension between sales and programming goals has never been greater since it’s now possible to know exactly how many commercials per hour listeners can accept as well as which ones, right down to the minute, drive listeners away.

Hopefully, media buyers and clients - let alone our own radio company executives - know as they incent air personalities and programmers to build audience, we work in their best interest to improve the reach and impact of their messages as we police what listener actions show is “clutter.”

Once this PR tempest dies down, in addition to the words “sex” and “rape,” I’d like to nominate some other phrases radio has a right to insist be removed from the air: “open every Friday night ‘til nine,” “check our website for more details,” “for all your (fill in the blank) needs,” "we'll do whatever it takes to get your business," “your big volume dealer,” "if you're $10,000 or more in debt, you need...,” "best selection", "bigger variety", "no one has better service," “save, save, save,” “going out of business,” and a plethora of long-hackneyed phrases and words that have gone far past being irritating and entered into the lexicon of things listeners simply avoid or ignore, which is a fate even worse than tune-out.

Hopefully, both charities and advertisers will pay attention to the recommendations of the people who know the medium and the target best, so that we can work together to build and hold audience, making fully-engaged listeners respond with the actions we all want and need.

Radio must be fully accountable as the business listens to clients .. and our community.

We have always had two sets of customers, but now - thanks to PPM - the one which used to silently change stations when we offended them now have a loud, clear, statistically-trackable voice it would be foolish to ignore.

Never Seen This Before!

The note from John Windus, PD at KKRV/Wenatchee says it:

"Oh, Copytimer! Is there anything you CAN'T do?"

* Accurately times scripts written in English or Spanish.

* Offers three different modes for different script formats:

* Spot Timer times all the text you enter in a flash.

* Script Timer supports a screenplay format, timing only dialogue.

* Video Timer supports a two-column format, timing only audio.

* Web-based Copytimer™ requires no installation or disk space.

* Write, edit and time scripts from any computer, anywhere.

* Print scripts directly from the Copytimer™ program.

* Conveniently save your scripts as DOC files or PDFs.

* Save your files both locally and remotely for safekeeping.

* Time your scripts as you write them, saving untold work.

* Work with scripts faster and more efficiently than ever before.

... i.e., VERY cool stuff!