So your station won another creative award. That’s great news. You can now post that shiny new plaque with all the others in your station’s lobby to illustrate how talented your creative department is at writing award-winning commercials for your clients. Congratulations!
But...not to diminish the accomplishment...if you walk through virtually any radio station in the country, you will probably see their walls too are full of plaques for award-winning commercials. You’d think that with all those awards for creative excellence adorning our hallways, our clients in radio should be knocking down our doors to get on the air and become fabulously successful...right? If you’re clients are, congratulations again...but if they’re not, reflect on this.
The goal of creative and scheduling should be to create effective campaigns for our clients so they become successful - not merely impress our peers. Unfortunately, most do not accomplish this objective: they fall down in one or more of the following areas. An effective radio campaign comes in three parts:
1. the campaign strategy
2. the creative message
3. the media plan
All 3 require equal stringent consideration.
The Campaign Strategy
How would you like to look into your client’s business future before they leap into a major advertising campaign? What if you could input their product idea, marketing plan, sales presentation or service into a computer to find the success rate of the idea before investing precious time and hard earned money?
Doug Hall is the author of “Jump Start Your Business Brain” and founder and CEO of Eureka Ranch, a Cincinnati Ohio “invention & research think tank. The Ranch specializes in creating new products and services for corporate clients including American Express, Ford Motor Company, Nike, Inc. and The Walt Disney Company. Doug's technology is in the form of a marketplace simulation computer that forecasts the probability of success for your business ideas.
Eureka Ranch’s research and development team spent 6 years and millions of dollars to create their technology. Through pain staking analysis, Doug has distilled an amazingly large number of variables down to the following three essentials that he says make up 75% of the information you would get from his full analysis – one that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In order to achieve maximum results for your clients, their campaign must include the following.
Distinct benefit
Their product or service offering must have a very distinct benefit for the target. Features are not benefits. “Organic” is not a feature. Describe what they will feel with your product or service. For example, a concert series was promoted as “An evening with the music of Bach, Chopin and Liszt” with little success. The name was changed to “An evening of romance” and sales increased 50%. The same series improved attendance over 100% over 2 years (who says sex doesn’t sell!)
Credibility
Their product or service has twice the chance of success if it is believable. In no continent is trust in a more dismal state than in North America. For example, in the United States, government, business, and media are all distrusted by respondents (ages 25 to 64) to do what is right, even with the current administration. Trust in U.S. business—at 38% down from 58% last year—is the lowest in the Barometer’s tracking history among informed publics ages 35 to 64—even lower than in the wake of Enron and the dot-com bust. What do you have that people have a reason to believe? People have a high degree of skepticism about sales pitches so be real, tell them the truth and do what you promise.
Dramatic difference
The product or service has 3 times the chance for success if it is dramatically different. Obviously this is the most difficult thing to have but it is very important. Your product or service will die if it doesn’t offer something. If you have no difference, then you are a commodity. How low will you sell? Profitable business is not for wimps. Hard-to-execute should not be a deterrent. It should be an opportunity.
If the client’s product or service doesn’t meet all these requirements, figure out how they can - or they will probably fail and so will you at developing a repeating customer; you will only get a sale. Get over how difficult it is though; the low hanging fruit is all been picked.
The Creative Message: How well is the message received?
There have been countless articles about scheduling commercials and their effect on listening levels but precious little about how effective they are for your audience. The thought is that if commercials were more attractive, entertaining and relevant, perhaps they wouldn’t be such a tune out for stations. Anxious to find out how well our commercials that we intended to enter into an industry competition performed with our listeners, we conducted an extensive research project to determine how well our well written and produced commercials for several clients performed. We discovered some surprising information. It seemed our listeners:
• Didn’t think many of the messages tested were all that entertaining. On average, they scored 5 out of 10 for likeability. A ”hit” radio commercial should score over 7
• Thought most tested commercials confused listeners about the specific point they were trying to convey. Less than half were able to tell us the client’s specific USP we thought to be communicating. So more than half of the respondents had no idea what the client’s benefit was. And for many of those that did get the message, the benefit description was vague
• Generally were not very likely to buy the products or services that were being advertised. In spite of how good we thought the commercials were, the average score was 5 out of 10 on how likely they were to buy the product or service as a result of hearing this commercial
It seems our award winning commercials were neither that entertaining, fascinating nor effective in delivering the client’s message.
Why? Probably for several reasons. One: we spend a lot of time trying to be funny in our commercials. Some client once said; “have fun with it” (it being the message I suppose). Although Jay Leno has hundreds of the television industry’s top comedy writers providing him material, even some of his jokes still come off flat. So what chance do you think Bob or Sue down the aisle in the copy department (if one even exists) has to write great comedy on a regular basis?
Second, the offers aren’t that fascinating. Sally Hogshead writes in her book
Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion And Captivation if you use these 7 triggers at the right time in the right situation you can influence people decisions on which brands they choose.
Third the client has a laundry list of stuff they want you to know about them. And because they don’t understand marketing as well as we should, they want to tell you their name address, telephone number, every feature in their store and maybe even stuff about their personal life.
It occurred to me that in a world where internet research is so inexpensive it’s a shame that every commercial we produce for every client isn’t subjected to creative scrutiny. In this way, you can show the client how ineffective it is to not focus on their one USP, you can tell if you have succeeded into fascinating people with your message and you don’t have to be funny to be entertaining. If stations did this kind of research they’re commercials would be more effective for their clients and more relevant for their listeners.
The Media Plan: How do our radio schedules perform?
The third part of any client’s successful campaign involves the required frequency a commercial should be aired to maximize effectiveness. While Katz’s O.E.S. is a good start, it is used to primarily consider the average frequency of a campaign. Research conducted by The Webster Group in New York demonstrated many years ago confirms that effective frequency is between 3 and 10. It depends on what the offer is: the more attractive the offer, the less frequency is required.
What the Webster Group also found though was that a commercial with a frequency of below 3 is too low and ineffective, between 10 and 15 is wasted and ineffective and over 15 it is ineffective, wasted and actually becomes negative (“if I hear that commercial one more time I’ll rip out my hair”) . The goal then is to get an actual frequency of between 3 and 10 for our commercials.
Average frequency can be deceiving. Because if the average frequency of a campaign is 6, (theoretically excellent,) a frequency distribution analysis might show that the message actually was heard 1 time by 40% of the audience (too little) and over 20 times by another 30% (way too much.) In this example then, 70% of the frequency is wasted, ineffective or downright negative.
It’s important that you do a frequency distribution analysis for your client.
For more information you can download a free B.R.I.M. (Business Results Improvement) Program Brochure by clicking here: (BRIM Program Brochure)
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