The truth, now: Don’t most radio commercials bore you to tears? And don’t you actually hate some of them, and really like only a few? If you’re an advertiser, it’s almost a certainty that your commercials fall into the first two categories.

Ouch. Worse, it’s wasted money.

I’d like to show you several things about advertising on the radio that will help you to avoid wasting money and get you to be able to spot the difference between a commercial that pulls and one that doesn’t.

First we’ll start with absolutely what (almost) never to do: Don’t let radio stations write or schedule your commercials. Before you radio folks come after me, well, I was a program director for several years. I was certain I knew what a good commercial was. I didn’t.

Don’t let the station voice it. As Dan O’Day, the highest-paid freelance advertising writer in the world says, “If you want to do voice over for an agency, do not tell them you are in radio, for they will not hire you. More about this later.

But you, the advertiser, thinks, “The radio stations schedule, write, and produce commercials for free!” Well, they don’t. If you weren’t paying them for airtime, would they do anything for you? No, the reason not to let (except in certain instances) stations write, produce, and schedule your advertising is because most of them are not correctly trained to do any of it. And they don’t know they aren’t trained correctly.

Most air schedules lack good “frequency” — that is, the number of times a given listener will hear your message within seven days. Most of the time, stations measure the number of times a listener hears your commercial over the life of the schedule, or by the month. It should be measured by the week only.

Your commercials are often spread over a too-wide period of time on the clock. Since radio listening is habitual, meaning we listen at pretty much the same time every day, a station has not one but several audiences. Listeners at 8 AM are not the same as the ones listening at 2 PM. You have to treat each “audience” a station has as if it were the only one listening.

If you try to hit the three major audiences a station has (6-10A, 10-3P, and 3-7P) but don’t have enough commercials in any one of them to be effective, you’re wasting your money. If you can afford all three, that’s very good. If you can’t, hit one or two correctly. You’ll get far better response. Frequency always trumps audience size for effectiveness in advertising. Always.

Frequency cannot be measured unless the station buys Arbitron Radio Ratings or another nationally-recognized ratings service. There is a formula into which audience ratings are plugged, and this enables frequency to be calculated. You can buy a nice car with what the Arbitron service costs every six months and many stations either cannot afford it or they know their numbers aren’t good. Do not let them tell you that “the ratings aren’t worth it.”

Who at the station writes your commercial? Most stations don’t have dedicated copywriters, and of the ones who do, generally you’ll find them in urban markets, but not always. Unfortunately, many are hired off the street and write with no training or experience. And experience alone doesn’t guarantee good copy. If someone is not properly trained, they will continue to do badly forever.

It’s much more likely that your sales rep gets handed a fact sheet (or he or she calls or sees you, asks you questions, and fills one out), and your rep, who is not trained — meaning “not qualified” — to write a commercial that will catch and hold attention, much less motivate a listener to cross your threshold, go to your website, or call you, writes it.

The radio and advertising agency industries are miles apart when it comes to writing and producing commercials. Most station copy uses hackneyed words and phrases: “This sale won’t last long,” “It’s the sale you’ve been waiting for” (Dan O’Day’s comment on that one is “You have no life”), “This sale ends soon” (the brain interprets that one as “This sale will never end, so I don’t have to hurry”). “Come see the professionals (or experts). Well gosh, aren’t you, by definition, professionals? Experts? Why waste air time telling listeners the obvious?

We’ve all heard these words and phrases endlessly. And we no longer hear them. O-U-C-H! Some refer to this fluff as “white noise.” You’re spending your money to air messages to whom almost no one pays attention.

In fact, most commercials aren’t commercials at all. They’re are announcements — lists of facts: “Hi, we’re Joe’s Car Repair. We fix front ends, recharge air conditioning, change the coolant, change oil, rotate tires, check the brakes and do state inspections. We’re your one-stop shop for car repair. Call us at 135 – 254 – 1592.” Close your eyes and repeat all of that. Human beings are not good at remembering lists of facts.

A true commercial talks to the listener about a problem he or she has or reminds him about something he wants or about something he has but needs more of. Then, and only then, is the listener told where to get it. Putting the name of the store at the beginning is a big fat turnoff, because the listener has not yet been given a reason to visit the store. You and I do not care about stores. We want to know two things — do you have what I want at a price I wish to pay?

Station-written copy goes to the their production dept. (a deejay). I was one. Deejays are interested in the sound of their voices. They are not trained to interpret copy. You and I can easily hear when someone’s reading copy they have no emotional or vested interest in.

Back in the early days of radio, there was only AM. It had a bad problem: static. Announcers had to overpronounce words merely to be understood. A “radio voice” developed. It has not been needed for 50 years, yet people still work on developing them. When you talk to a friend, do you put on a deep deejay voice and say “Heeeyyyy, good ta SEEEE ya! You know WHAT, I’M having a PARTY at SIX O’CLOCK and YOU’RRRRRRE INVIIIIITED!” Why do radio guys continue to talk like this? It’s because they’ve always done it.

So how do you do it right?

Here are some things a good commercial does.

It doesn’t talk to you as if you’re stupid by stating the obvious: “Hey, it’s SPRING!” It uses everyday language, spoken (unless it’s a comedy commercial, and then not always by any means) in a normal, interested tone of voice.

If it uses humor, the humor always drives the sales message. Too often, funny commercials are funny in the mistaken belief that it will get more attention paid to it. Perhaps — but the listener will remember the funny stuff and not the name of the advertiser nor why he should go there. BIG ouch.

It is performed by a voice over artist whose voice is matched to the style of the commercial. Agencies have access to hundreds of voice over artists. Stations use their air staffs. This means that your commercial and those of three of your competitors are quite often read by the same person. Goodbye credibility.

And now it’s produced digitally. That’s good, right?

Digital technology is wonderful for editing commercials. It allows one to edit a commercial in a 10th to a 100th of the time as it took in the past.

But there’s something very insidious and damaging to your message that it also allows editors to do, something that’s been embraced by the radio industry. First, it allowed all the breath intakes to be removed quickly, which meant sentences could be jammed together without the small pauses necessary for the brain to process what it has just heard. And the latest abomination is that, in order to cram still more copy into those 30 seconds, deejays read the commercial one sentence at a time, separately, and edit them so that a new sentence begins just before the last word of the previous sentence has died out. Clients are happy, thinking the more words in their ad the better value it is.

Only two troubles with this: First, it sounds totally unnatural (and fairly screams “This is a commercial”). Second, the brain is not a rain barrel. The more words you shove at it in a short period, reading quickly, not using pauses (one of the most important tools in getting an idea across well that there is), the less likely the listener is to understand what the heck has just been said.

Do you want to shell out money to have your commercial made into a Frankenstein monster like this, one that no one pays attention to and is glad when it’s over?

The main point

Most radio commercials are not commercials at all. they are announcements, or lists of facts. They go like this: Right now at Joe’s Shoe Store, 1184 South Cambridge Road in Carleton, you can get Florsheims in any style for 40 percent off. Any style! But this wonderful offer won’t last long! You’ve waited all year for this! Come see the experts at Joe’s, where every style of Florsheim — EVERY STYLE! — is 40% OFF! Remember, this sale ends soon! You’ll find Joe’s at 1184 South Cambridge Road in Carleton. Call us at 555-1398. 555-1398. That’s 555-1398! Our visit us online at www dot Shoe Deals dot com! That’s Shoe Deals dot com! It’s 40% off Sale Time at Joe’s!

First, no one cares about Joe’s Shoe Store. Or Wal-mart. Sony. Any business at all. I don’t care. You don’t care. We want to know one thing: “Do you have what I want at a price I’m willing to pay?” Starting a commercial with the name of your business nearly guarantees that the listener’s attention will be gone in 3 seconds.

It’s like going to a car dealer and saying, “I’d like to look at a –” only to have the salesman say “Give me twenty-five thousand dollars first.” “Um, can I see a car first before I agree to pay for it?” But that’s what you’re asking your listener to do when the first thing he hears is the name of your store. You’ve given him no reason to go there, and his attention is somewhere else within three to five seconds.

A real commercial engages listener attention by telling her something meaningful to her life or about a problem she has (“Got itchy feet? Here’s the answer!”) why she needs what you have (she already knows why she needs it). Then tell her how your product or service (or even your attitude) will get her what she needs, and why she should see you instead of your competitors.

Now, of course, you don’t just say it in dry language. That’s where creativity — real creativity, not the kind that exists solely to gain attention in clever ways, which is how I used to write — enters the picture. And it’s a subject as complex as several years of medical school. Which is why radio station reps generally don’t write well. They haven’t been trained. Or air people don’t deliver the copy convincingly — they don’t know that they don’t know.

And it’s why you are not a good judge of what will work for you. You aren’t trained. Even more importantly, because you own your business, you are emotionally involved in its success, and emotion clouds objectivity. If you’re going to spend the money to advertise on the radio, and you don’t want to end up saying “I tried radio (or newspaper, or television, or the Internet) and it didn’t work” — which is actually saying “I tried radio wrong and it didn’t work” — then get an agency or freelancer with a proven track record and good client referrals to write and produce your sales messages.

Would you trust your taxes with someone who’s filled out 10 short-form returns? Trust your health and life to someone practicing medicine without a license? Then why trust the only word-of-mouth you can control — your commercial sales messages — to someone without training?

I’ve written this because, unfortunately, most businesses do not know what a real commercial is nor what it takes to write something that listeners will pay attention to. They believe that when their commercial comes on, the world stops in its tracks and listens. No, what really happens over ninety percent of the time is — nothing. Big, big ouch.

An agency with a good track record and good credentials should be writing, producing, and scheduling your radio advertising. Most get paid by commissions from the radio stations. Others are fee-for-service. Whichever way it is, it’s a deal, because radio commercials cost a fraction of what television commercials cost to produce or air. You may find cable TV outlets who will sell you commercials for as low as a dollar a spot, but you get no freqency from them. It’s impossible. But that a story for another day.

Thanks for reading! I hope it helps you and your business. MH