MediaDailyNews had a nice little article about the following conundrum: millions of people listen to radio yet the revenue is shrinking. While ratings are holding relatively constant, despite satellite radio, Ipods and internet radio, somewhere around 90% of adults listen to at least some “terrestrial” radio every single week.
But the article also talks about something that I had heard before, but needed reminding: creatives don’t like working in radio because they don’t see a lot of payoff. TV, Print…likely even billboards seem sexier than radio to many copywriters. And so creatives don’t give the radio copy their best efforts. From there it’s a trickle down effect: the poorer the ads, the worse the results. The worse the results, the lower the spend. The lower the spend, the less you have for creative costs dedicated to radio. And so on…
And that’s why I love radio endorsements. You only need to create some key bullet points with your value propositions. The
-
hosts
then get to be the creative ones. And usually, on a national level, the hosts fees are wrapped into the unit costs.
So, in effect, you’re still capturing all of those millions of ears listening to talk radio with better than “produced” ads, without having to pay a dime to some “creatives” who would rather work on tv ads.
Amen brother… I’m not about to preach to the choir. I just wanted to add a voice here in case someone outside of radio runs accross the blog.
It would be nice if a “creative” or two would figure this out.
Oh and if, as the Wizard says, agencies would buy radio with a comparable budget as they do with TV, or used to with newspaper, they’d also see a different result, instead of running radio with 8% to 15% of the total campaign budget. Dollar for dollar, comparing mass media, radio wins.