Category Archives: Copywriting

crumpled up first draft

Your First Draft SHOULD Be Too Long

When I write a 60-second radio script, my first draft is sometimes closer to two minutes.

The first draft is where I dump out an idea, start writing, and see where it leads.

The next few drafts are where I decide which words deserve to survive.

Speaking and communications coach Phillip Humm calls a common communication mistake “spray and pray.” We give people every detail. Every feature. Every reason. Every teeny-tiny nugget we’re afraid to leave out.

Then we hope something sticks.

It happens in sales presentations too.

You’ve got 37 slides, research, coverage maps, ratings, demographics and enough charts to make your PowerPoint need a cigarette afterward.

But what’s the ONE thing you want the prospect to understand?

Humm recommends a great exercise: explain your idea in two minutes. Then one minute. Then 15 seconds.

You’re not practicing how to talk faster. You’re forcing yourself to decide what matters.

Try it with your next radio script.

Write everything you might want to say. Then start cutting.

Creative is too important to treat the first draft as the finished product. Kill the weak sentence. Lose the second-best benefit. Remove the clever line that doesn’t move the idea forward.

Keep the strongest words, images, emotions and specifics. Specific details give listeners something they can actually see, hear or feel – which makes them much harder to forget.

Great writing usually isn’t created by adding more. It’s uncovered by removing what doesn’t belong.

Most advertisers will happily give you 90 seconds of information they think absolutely has to be in the ad. Your job is to protect them from themselves (which should be a topic on its own).

Whether you have :60, :30, or :15… your job isn’t to fill the time…
Your job is to make the time matter.

By the way, this article was at least 25% longer when I started.

Would your sales team benefit from having a better reason to contact advertisers every single week? SoundADvice gives your entire radio sales team practical, advertiser-focused content designed to help open more doors, protect more clients, and create more revenue.

Email me at [email protected] and I’ll send you the important details. It costs less than three lattes a week.

radio sales and marketing
radio sales ideas and advice blog

Don’t Sell 52 Weeks of Random Ads

If you’re asking an advertiser to commit to a long-term branding campaign, there should probably be a better creative strategy than:

“We’ll write you a new commercial every month or so.”

Otherwise, you may just be selling them 12 different commercials fighting for custody of the same brand.

Advertising trainer and BrandsFormation author Chuck Mefford teaches a a memorable way to build long-term campaigns: Bricks & Mortar.

The bricks change.

Stories. Humor. Customer problems. Situations. Seasonal angles. Different creative ways to earn the listener’s attention.

The mortar stays.

The positioning idea. Slogan. Jingle. Distinctive voice. Music. Sonic signature. Memorable phrases. The brandable pieces an advertiser can eventually own.

Here’s a completely made-up, rough example for our fake business, Northstar Appliance Repair.

Their main mortar is:

“Your appliance broke. Your day doesn’t have to.”

Now watch how we can build around it…

60-SECOND EXAMPLE

[BRICK]

SFX: Washing machine banging violently.

WOMAN: Okay. That’s new.

SFX: BANG. THUMP. BANG.

WOMAN: Honey?

MAN: Oh wow. If you’re wondering whether the washing machine is supposed to walk across the laundry room… I’m gonna say no.

ANNCR: Appliances have a way of breaking at the best times. Like Sunday night. The kids need clean clothes for school tomorrow, and the laundry basket looks like it reproduced overnight.

[MORTAR]

At Northstar Appliance Repair, we give you a realistic appointment window, let you know when we’re on the way, and explain what’s wrong before we start fixing it.

[BRICK]

SFX: Another loud THUMP.

MAN: Good news. It stopped moving.

WOMAN: Yeah, because it hit the wall.

MAN: Ah.

[MORTAR]

ANNCR:  Washer. Dryer. Refrigerator. Range. Dishwasher. When one quits, you’ve already got enough aggravation. You don’t need your repair company becoming another problem.

SFX: Two-note appliance ding

Northstar Appliance Repair. Your appliance broke. Your day doesn’t have to.

Now next month, we don’t throw all of that away and start over.

We change the brick.

One more example. 30 seconds this time…

30-SECOND EXAMPLE

[BRICK]

MAN: Why is the milk warm?

WOMAN: Why is the freezer making soup?

SFX: Short stinger

MAN: I’m afraid to ask about the ice cream.

ANNCR: When your refrigerator quits, you don’t need a lecture about compressors. You need somebody to fix the refrigerator.

[MORTAR]

Northstar Appliance Repair gives you a realistic appointment window, lets you know when we’re coming, and explains the repair before the work begins.

SFX: Two-note appliance ding

Northstar Appliance Repair. Your appliance broke. Your day doesn’t have to.

Different problem. Different story. Different commercial.

Same advertiser. Same promise. Same “house”.

I’m pretty dang sure we could make this fake appliance repair business a household name!

One important note: Bricks and mortar is one very effective way to build a long-term branding campaign. It’s not the only way. Great advertising can take a lot of different forms. Don’t turn a good framework into another formula.

This also gives you a much better way to sell long-term Radio.

Just don’t rush the start date. Take the time to build something great for your new client. If you tell them it may take 3 or 4 weeks to get the strategy and creative right, that alone sends a message: you’re not just trying to get them on the air. You’re trying to make this work!

Keep the mortar. Change the bricks.

Build a campaign – not a pile of commercials.

Something that has a chance to (in the words of Chuck Mefford) turn a good small business into a great local brand!

Would your sales team benefit from having a better reason to contact advertisers every single week? SoundADvice gives your entire radio sales team practical, advertiser-focused content designed to help open more doors, protect more clients, and create more revenue.

Email me at [email protected] and I’ll send you the important details. It costs less than three lattes a week.

One Ad. One Job.

One of the hardest parts of writing a great radio ad isn’t deciding what to put in.

It’s having the guts to decide what to leave out.

Especially when you’re writing a branding ad – one designed to make a business known, liked, trusted, and remembered over time.

Too many radio ads try to accomplish six things in 30 or 60 seconds. And when an ad tries to do everything, it usually does nothing particularly well.

I recently read an article by storytelling coach Phillip Humm that offered a wonderfully simple formula for telling a short story: one character, one challenge, one specific moment, and one clear takeaway.

That translates beautifully to writing radio ads.

One Character.
Give listeners someone to identify with. Your customer. The business owner. The frustrated homeowner standing ankle-deep in something they really don’t want to be standing in.

One Problem.
Don’t try to solve everything the business does in one commercial. Pick a problem people actually care about (or can relate to) and build the ad around it.

One Specific Moment.
Don’t say, “We offer emergency plumbing service.”

Say, “It’s 2:13 in the morning and water is coming up through the basement drain.”

Now I can see it. That’s powerful.

Specifics are sticky. Generalities slide right through our brains like a greased watermelon through our hands.

One Big Idea.
When the ad ends, what ONE thing do you want the listener to remember?

Not six things. One.

That doesn’t mean your client only gets to talk about one thing forever. Write another ad. Then another. Over several commercials, you can tell a much bigger story about the business.

But each individual ad should have a job.

And if you give one radio ad twelve jobs, don’t be surprised when it doesn’t do any of them very well.

Before you send your next script to production, ask yourself:

What is this ad’s ONE job?

If you can’t answer that, your ad probably isn’t finished yet.

Better ad writing makes your clients’ money go further and work harder. Don’t they deserve a little more of your time – and an ad that does its ONE job really well?

Duane Christensen
Ens Media

If you’d like to learn how our SoundADvice program can help your entire Radio sales team open more doors, protect more clients, and create more revenue, email me at [email protected] to request more info. We’ll send you the important details ASAP. And it costs less than 3 lattes a week.

increase radio revenues
creative is the engine

Creative is Not a “Nice to Have” – It’s the Whole Dang Engine

Let’s pretend your client’s Radio campaign is a car. 

Reach? That’s the tires. Strategy? That’s your GPS. Budget / Repetition? Absolutely, that’s the gas tank (enough “fuel” is very important). But the creative? That’s the engine that actually moves the thing forward. 

And according to a massive study by Nielsen and NCSolutions – we’re talking 450 campaigns across all kinds of media – guess what accounted for 49% of the sales lift? 

Bingo. The creative. 

Meanwhile, targeting (the thing most advertisers obsess over) was responsible for just 11%. Eleven! We’ll call that the cupholder. 

The crazy part – most marketers feel that only around 21% of ad effectiveness comes from the creative – when 49% does! And that 25% of ad effectiveness comes from targeting – when only 11% does! See video link from Cumulus Media | Westwood One Audio Active Group at the end of this article that illustrates this wide gap between perception and reality.  

Great creative is the part that makes people care. It’s the spark. The story. The laugh at a red light. It’s what earns trust, grabs attention, and gets remembered. 

Wouldn’t you like to separate yourself from all the other advertising salespeople out there who are touting all the same old crap – like reach, station rankings, demographics, impressions, etc.???!!! 

If your clients would ever question why you spend time crafting, refining, and rewriting radio scripts – tell them this: “Creative drives ROI.” Period. Not in the fluffy, artsy way. In the measurable, customers-in-the-door, dollars-in-the-till kind of way. 

Every time you present a campaign, you’re handing your client either a rusty old beater or a sleek, emotional powerhouse. They both might get airtime, but only one’s going to get results. 

Want to sell more effectively, renew easier, and cause your clients to love you more? 

Make better ads. 

Here’s a link to an 11-minute video from the “Cumulus Media Westwood One Audio Active Group” YouTube channel that summarizes the studies mentioned above very nicely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-wZxQaROuI 

Note: At about the 4:30 mark, it says, “Creative is a key driver of advertising performance… second only to investment levels”. Meaning, don’t skimp on the number of ads you schedule. Repetition is very key. Targeting, not so much. 

Specifics are sticky image

Specifics are Sticky

When writing radio ads, the details are everything. The difference between an ad that fades into the background and one that sticks in a listener’s memory often comes down to one thing – specifics. 

Vague statements like “we care about our customers” or “we have great prices” are forgettable. They’re wallpaper. They’re limp and useless. But say, “We answer the phone in three rings, even on Sundays,” and suddenly the listener sees it, believes it, and remembers it. Specifics build credibility. They paint a picture. They give the brain something to hold onto. 

When writing for the ear, generalities slide right off. But details? Details dig in. They light up the senses. The sound of tires crunching gravel as someone pulls into their driveway. The smell of bacon on a Saturday morning. Say “2:13 a.m.” instead of “the middle of the night.” Those small touches invite the listener to feel the ad, not just hear it. 

People don’t remember generalities or trite phrases. They remember moments. So, give them moments – real, colorful, sensory moments. That’s where emotion lives. That’s where trust is built. 

Radio is a theater of the mind. You must paint a picture. If you want your ad to be listened to and remembered, don’t aim to be clever. Aim to be clear, bold, and tangible. Give your audience something they can see, smell, hear, or feel. 

Pull up a sampling of past ads you’ve written – you’ll probably notice they could use a lot more “color”. Start writing more specifically – today. If you’re short on specifics to work from, go ask your clients better questions (remember last week’s article?), and get the details you need to create better ads!  

Generalities and vagueness are forgettable. Specifics are sticky. Make your message stick.