If there were a top-10 list of “do’s and don’ts” when working with a radio advertising agency, this one would be on the list:

Don’t rush your radio agency’s creative process.

Few advertising agencies will ever tell you this. Why? Because we want to please the customer. Sometimes, as hard as we try not to fall into the trap, we will try to please you even when it isn’t in your best interest to do so.

We were recently reminded of this phenomenon. A client was in a hurry to be on the air as soon as possible. (Not unusual.) He asked how soon we could have him some radio commercials for review. We took into consideration our current line-up of creative projects and the time we thought would be necessary to produce great work and we gave him a date. It wasn’t fast enough for him, and we then received the hard-charging business-guy press for “more, better, faster”.

We folded. Caved. “Okay, we’ll do that for you.” And we quickly realized it was a mistake. When it comes to writing radio commercials, the process cannot be rushed. It is not a matter of sitting down and writing a half a page of words. It can be that, but then the chances of success are severely diminished. Why? Because that’s just not the way insights occur. And if you write radio commercials without some set of insights about your customer’s underlying thoughts, emotions and perceived needs, you’ll get one thing with 100-percent certainty: a radio ad that sounds like a lot of other radio ads. And that’s usually a radio ad that won’t do as well as hoped.

In this case, we had to go back and tell the client that more time would be required before we could present them with radio commercial concepts that we felt were up to par. And we re-learned a valuable lesson.

Be careful what you ask for. When you work with your radio advertising agency, don’t push them on the timeline for developing radio commercials. No agency will purposely drag out the process of creating radio ads. So when they give you a date for delivery of creative work, believe them. They need time to get into the project and produce the best results. If you’re in a hurry, find time elsewhere or reconfigure your launch plans.

Jeff Small is CEO and Brett Astor is vice president of Strategic Media Inc.

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Tags: brett astor, dr radio, jeff small, radio advertising, strategic media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Advertising, Direct Response, Marketer, Radio, Retailer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.