Let me digress again to make another point. When a radio personality applies for a job, he/she sends an “aircheck”, which is an audio demo of how he sounds on-the-air doing a real show. A long time ago I was told that if your aircheck didn’t impress the Program Director in the first 10 or 15 seconds, you were tossed into the waste bin. I think it’s true because being a Program Director twice, that’s about all I ever gave someone’s aircheck.
If our standards as Radio people are so stringent for entertainment value, why should we expect our listeners to have a lower standard? In other words: every commercial should be entertaining enough to quickly grab the listener’s attention and imagination.
So then, how does Radio do this? It starts with a commitment to flush out, once-and-for-all, some of the awful techniques and habits that have seeped into the state of our current commercial production:
1. Don’t encourage clients to voice their own commercials - especially if they are just plain horrible - just for the sake of the sale. If an account executive is talented enough to sell commercial time, he should be talented enough to talk a client out of doing his own spot.
2. Commercials should never consist of just a voice reading copy over a music bed. I’m sorry, but that’s just not compelling enough.
3. Radio stations should consider hiring copywriters again – talented people who can create engaging 30 or 60 second theater of the mind commercials. Today, most commercials are written by sales people. Bless their hearts: they made the sale – don’t make them write the copy, too.
4. Radio stations should seek out Production Directors (the people in charge of overseeing the making of the commercials) who are not comfortable settling for mediocrity.
5. Production Directors should always insure the right commercial version is running in the right format. Some products, like Coke and Pepsi, for instance, create commercials designed for specific formats: Rock, R&B, Alternative, etc. I’ve heard R&B versions run on Alternative stations and vice versa. That’s lazy and a disservice to the listeners. Someone listening to a Classic Rock station is not much interested in hearing a hip-hop version of a Pepsi commercial.
6. Radio stations should never accept sub-standard production from advertising agencies. It is unbelievable what some smaller agencies pass off as radio-quality production. And worse: some radio stations don’t even question it.
In short: every moment of airtime at a radio station should be treated as if its entertainment potential could mean the difference between a listener staying or leaving….because it does.
If traditional radio stations adopted a “Super Bowl mentality” when it came to those 12 or so minutes of commercial time each hour, then maybe the promise of commercial-free music on Satellite Radio wouldn’t be as alluring to listeners.
