Giving Radio Creativity a Better Airing

Radio Is Like A Door-To-Door Salesman

No, really, it is. When a door-to-door salesman calls, he is invariably an interruption. Dragged away from what you would rather be doing, if the salesman is rude, aggressive or unsavoury, you'll literally shut him out. But if he has a winning smile and a friendly line in patter, you'll probably give him a sympathetic, if sceptical ear. Ditto when you're dragged away from your radio programme to hear a commercial. If it's got a nice personality you're much more likely to feel warmly disposed to it. Is not the personality of the advertising the personality of the company?

Creativity Is Cheaper

At a time when there were a dozen window companies advertising on one of our stations, the smallest one with the smallest budget got the lion's share of business because they were the only advertiser with any imagination in their advertising. Domination doesn't necessarily mean buying up all the space in the medium, it can mean taking all the relevant space in the listener's memory.

Invest In The Future

With many products, very few people are actually in the market at precisely the time of advertising. In newspapers, this generally means no more than turning the page on an irrelevant ad. On radio, it means either entertaining a potential future customer with a compelling commercial which makes him think well of you as someone to do business with, or really hacking him off with something both irrelevant and boring. I know which I'd sooner do.

Don't Look In The Mirror

How much advertising, in any medium, is all about the client and his business? The people with the money are the punters - and the most effective radio advertising of which I'm aware starts with an appreciation not of the product, but of the reasons when, how and why the customer will buy the product.

Those wonderful people, the public, care neither for your business nor mine. The only thing they care about are their own needs. Don't take up any more of your valuable time telling them anything more about yourself than you need to get them to buy from you.