John Smeddle, Creative Head, WithFeelingQuick. Think of a radio ad you heard recently that made you laugh out loud. Or that stayed with you the whole day. Or pulled the rug out from under you. And the trigger for your humour, your thoughts or your surprise was the brand being advertised itself.
I once heard a kid on radio who, when asked by his teacher to stand up and tell the class about his holiday, proceeded to innocently swear like a trooper when describing helping his dad do some home improvement work.
The swearing was bleeped out, of course. But that just made it even more hilarious. This was a radio commercial for IKEA Australia and couldn’t have represented the easy-to-assemble furniture store better. It is a masterclass in radio advertising.
Or how about the demented Texan who tells the story about how his lifelong, psychotic hatred for bugs drove him to create a pest control company which would have used nukes on termites, if it were allowed.
The company is McGraths and if the internet is to be believed, it’s the funniest commercial ever made.
What made these commercials brilliant? Not just the frustration and physical pain self-inflicted during home renovations, nor the irrational terror of insects.
Those are just strategic insights. No, it was just a writer who thought long and hard about how to make the listener feel the people behind the brand are empathetic.
The phrase ‘people behind the brand’ is deliberate because that’s what radio advertising is missing right now: human to human communication.
If a listener laughs, or thinks about an ad long after they heard it, or were genuinely surprised by it, they are responding to something created by another human being. The connective tissue is the brand.
Why have we forgotten that?
When I was told about the alarming volume of radio advertising creation and production being outsourced to a cheaper and faster supplier, my first reaction was ‘oh well, there goes another creative bastion breached by the accountants’.
I can just see the rodent smiles of the number crunchers, expressing relief that another zero margin burden has been lifted from their shoulders.
I might have even had some simpatico for these lords of the ledger, had they not been the ones that created the original revenue model for ad agencies in the first place. You know, the one that imploded so spectacularly recently.
Simultaneously, the medium has been quietly disappearing from the creative directors’ menu of low hanging fruit for fame and silverware.
At least, the type of radio which makes people think about the brand, not draw attention to some sort of tech wizardry. I remember one awards show where the winner was an outdoorsy magazine which transmitted an inaudible signal at a frequency which frightened mosquitos away, thereby making a camping trip less intolerable. Except the tech was non-existent.
The judges thought it was a great idea and awarded it without even checking. But at the same time they were quite happy to downgrade a brilliant commercial for Toyota, in which the announcer demonstrated the accuracy of new built-in sensors which could accurately detect movement around corners, by informing us what radio commercials were to follow.
It was a demo for built-in sensors which could detect movement around corners. When you have the so-called gatekeepers who decide what is quality radio and what isn’t, by judging a faux technology over a thoughtful, media-perfect idea such as the Toyota ad; well, no wonder there exists little or no motivation to think more deeply about a radio brief.
There are still a few radio warriors out there. Writers who imagine themselves to be the listener, to better understand them. Who wonder what type of mood they’re in when listening.
Who map out a stream of information in a way that’s digestible for them. Who just think, for heaven’s sake. Who don’t rely on AI. Who still believe that the closest authentic connection to the heart is through the ears.
Who still believe their clients deserve the enigmatic smile over the DIY copycat.
Perhaps we need to first focus our talent for persuasion on clients who are currently being told otherwise. By a spreadsheet.
By John Smeddle, Creative Head, WithFeeling
