ByrnesMedia

YOUR BIGGEST ADVERTISER

Chris Byrnes

Do you know who your radio station's biggest advertiser is? More importantly does each member of your staff? You would hope the Sales Manager knows, and your traffic manager should get it right. But beyond that you may be shocked to find that most of the staff has no idea who that advertiser is. Check out my theory by asking the next few staff members you encounter today.

 

So who is your biggest advertiser? They probably don’t appear on your revenue report, because that client is the radio station. If you count up all the promos, liners, bumpers and live IDs, your station will be the biggest consumer of time on your radio station.

 

So why do so many radio stations devote so little time and resources to make all these "ads" sound amazing? You can bet your next biggest advertiser does. They probably retain the services of an advertising agency to develop the creative, plan the campaign, book the right number of spots and select the perfect voice. They may even conduct market research to ensure their creative spots are delivering the right message and then, do post analysis to check they reached the target audience the desired number of times.

 

At most radio stations, promotional spots are normally written by someone who has this as an additional task, voiced hundreds of miles away, by someone who has never been to your radio station, and put together in the production room at the end of the day, time permitting, after all the clients’ spots have been made.

 

If you had to purchase this time from your radio station, would you demand that things were done differently? If the answer is yes, here are a few suggestions:

 

  • Ask the Obvious Questions: Who, What, When and How. Start by ensuring everyone involved knows exactly who the market is, and what is the key message you wish to deliver. Develop a written brief for each campaign. Then check each script to make sure it fits the brief.

 

  • Involve More People In the Creative Process: Sometimes the great ideas come from the least obvious places. Get the brief out to staff so they have time to come up with ideas, and reward the ideas used. This may not always be possible, but do it whenever you can.

 

  • The Campaign: Major campaigns need a tease, a reveal, an explanation, and lastly the backsell. Tell them you’re going to do it, do it, and then tell them you did it. So many stations forget to do the backsell promo which extends the life of a campaign, and helps reinforce that real people actually win radio prizes.

 

  • Daypart Your Messages: The normal rule is promote one or at the most two dayparts in advance, so in morning drive sell the benefits of mid-days and afternoon drive, in nights promote nights and overnights. This will allow you to run more spots, but will require more plays within the tighter dayparts to get the ideal reach and frequency.

 

  • Benefit vs. Features: How often do you hear station spots saying "We’re number one" or "We play the Bays Best music". Here’s the bad news... your audience doesn’t get it! In fact they tune out those messages because there is no benefit to them. Always look at a script and ask "What’s in it for me"? Forget selling features of your radio station, and concentrate on benefits.

 

  • How Often? Do a Reach & Frequency analysis to find the ideal number of plays required to reach the target audience four or more times. [This may take 15-20 plays]. Then change or update it. Don’t allow it to burn, but don’t pull it off because the talent gets sick of playing the spot. One way to extend the life of a spot is to record two versions and rotate them.

 

  • Grade Your Promo's: Develop four different rotation patterns and grade your promo’s A, B, C, D. You’re "A" promotional spots should be the most important item you are promoting on the radio station at that time, and should receive a higher rotation than the others. Count up how many spots you run per day, use your Reach & Frequency runs to determine the ideal rotation of each category and how many you can have within that category. Then stick to the rules, when your "sold out" don’t squeeze any extras in.

  • Separation: Check you have at least 30 minutes separation between each item to avoid running a promo and a live liner about the same subject in the same 30 minutes. Programs like RCS Linker are great at doing this automatically.

 

  • Duration and Word Count: Your recorded promotional spots should be 30 or 60 seconds long. If we demand our client’s spots fit into these windows, then the radio station should too. Be sure not to have too many words in the spot. We educate our clients not to clutter, so the same rules apply. An under worded spot can be so powerful. It's like the full-page advertisement with just one word in the middle of the page.

 

  • The Voice Guy: Ensure the talent understands your station. Send them an audience profile and have the PD explain everything that’s important about your station, the market and your competition. Send an aircheck of your station once a month so they can hear how the finished promo’s sound in the mix with the rest of the programming, and above all have the script writer put notes on the script explaining the type of read you’re looking for and anything else that’s important. If possible have the writer and producer on the phone during the voice session and "produce the talent".

 

  • Review: Every few months the things you wish to own or be famous for. If you want to be the station with the most reliable weather, you need to work out how you’re going to achieve this, and how you’ll know when you’ve arrived. In short how will you measure this?

 

So now you know who you’re biggest advertiser is, you can make sure you’re getting value for money and taking full advantage of our great medium. The right spot, played the right number of times will get your message across.

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