We know what works in radio advertising. It comes from the thousands of tests we’ve conducted over many years that have filled in the vast universe of possible actions one can take in building a radio advertising campaign, with reliable guideposts pointing toward success and away from failure.

But there’s a subtle paradox involved in that “knowing” of what works—a paradox that we’re required to understand fully before we can actually provide people with the benefit of our knowing.

The moment you believe you fully know everything, you essentially know nothing.

Think about it this way—if you know everything, you stop questioning. You stop looking, asking questions, seeking answers. And when you stop looking, you stop growing and learning—you stop getting better. Worse, though, you become rote, acting out of habitual patterns and approaches. You get mindlessly repetitive. You become boring—and if you’ve been exposed to advertisements lately, you’ll see how common this is. How all ads start sounding the same and they all air in the same places.

So “knowing” successfully requires the combination of two mindsets. One mindset is that of the wise old sage. It’s a mindset that acts with a confidence that comes from the combination of deep experience and lots of hard data about what works and what doesn’t.

The other mindset is the “child’s mind” approach. The approach that encourages us to look at a situation, a campaign, with fresh eyes as though we’re seeing this campaign and radio advertising for the very first time. Think of the way children are curious, uninhibited, not afraid to fail or ask a direct question, unencumbered by knowledge and unconditioned by experience.

Do you agree to the mindset paradox? Can this be applied across all media channels?

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

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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. (more…)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites