Spend ten minutes in a car, listening to commercial radio advertising, and you’ll be bombarded with radio ads that, to me, seem to break several cardinal rules in good ad craft. They forget that they are interrupting something our audience would rather be engaged with, and then often go on to insult the listeners’ intelligence, taste and eardrums.
Too often they shout and scream and cajole with the worst excesses of generic voiceover cheesiness.
Which means that the audience either turn off or tune out.
Why are so many radio ads so bad?
All of this is a shame, because there’s a golden opportunity to really engage with an audience on a single sensory level. Their eyes are tuned on the road and their hands are on the wheel. The ears are free for us to entertain.
At Anything is Possible we love this opportunity and, where some creatives see radio as a restriction, we see it as an opportunity to create something really entertaining and effective. And it seems to be a medium that more and more clients are trusting us to operate in.
Over the last few years we’ve created a scores of radio advertising campaigns that have really pulled above their budgetary weight. I thought it might be fun to share a few, so you can close your eyes and come on an auditory journey into our work.
Kew Gardens
In the spring of this year we worked with Kew Gardens to launch their ‘Sounds of Blossom’ show, with a radio ad that used some music specially composed by The Royal College of Music.
The narrator asks us, can blossom actually sing?
When you hear this ad you might think so.
Imperial War Museum – Duxford Air Show
This brief for the Duxford Air Show was a dream.
Imagine being able to transport anyone stuck in a traffic jam on the Hanger Lane gyratory, on a drizzly Monday morning, into the cockpit of an RAF Spitfire, somewhere over Kent, facing down the Luftwaffe. This was how we promoted the Battle of Britain Air Show. Using special effects we recreated the drama of a dog fight through crackly 1940s in-plane microphones.
Your commute never felt so exciting.
And ticket sales were record breaking.
Ashmolean Museum
We loved making this ad with the Ashmolean, Oxford. A stunning collection of obscure drawings by masters like Breugel and Reubens literally created the script for this radio ad.
The scope, scale and drama of the drawings inspired us to write a poem that linked subjects as counter posed as an anonymous drawing of a long dead and forgotten earthworm and an emperor from the history books.
In what other medium are you allowed to write poetry for an ad campaign? And get sign off from the Ashmolean? A fantastically collaborative client and different idea which boosted ticket sales no end.
Trust your ears
Radio advertising is a highly effective way of renting space in your audience’s heads.
So, next time you’re looking at your media budget the financial argument for going on radio really stacks up. Compared to TV or OOH radio is still a very affordable medium when you consider the reach it can have. And so the ROI can be compelling. And if you want to create a radio ad that inspires your audience, we have the in house expertise to collaborate with you on something that will box above its weight.
Like that earthworm.
(Or should that be earworm?)
