Go bye bye, not buy..

Posted: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:56:32 +0000
A colleague, a week or so ago, directed me to a piece from The Age newspaper.
I have placed the article below. It’s about Ralph van Dijk from Eardrum, in the Age (Funnily, The Age Green Guide TV & Radio guide has always been pro-ABC & anti commercial radio). In essence, it again goes through the same old principles I have been talking about for years. Read and you’ll enjoy
 Why listeners would rather go ‘bye’ than buy
 MICHAEL LALLO May 27, 2010 Super spruiker…Brunswick furniture dealer Franco Cozzo’s ads made him a local celebrity.

OUR talkback hosts can get a little shouty at times – but that’s nothing compared to the advertisements they cut to. Buy now! Limited offer! Don’t wait!
”It’s so wrong to shout on such an intimate medium,” says Ralph van Dijk, the founder and creative director of radio advertising agency Eardrum.
”Listeners form a bond with their station and then the ads come along and spoil it all by screaming at them.”
Of course, commercial stations wouldn’t exist without ads. Yet the tendency of advertisers to buy radio spots as an afterthought to their television campaigns – and their unwillingness to invest in the production of those ads – has led to a glut of commercials that range from bland to annoying.
Worse, most rely on a few tired tricks: silly sound effects, barked commands or a voice that changes tone (from, say, a squeaky nerd to a Barry White-esque lothario).
”Then there’s the overly enthusiastic conversation about a recent purchase,” van Dijk says, ”which concludes with someone saying, ‘Why, I’m going to buy one right now!’ And you hear their running footsteps.”
If you’re wondering why most ads sound identical, it’s because ”the same handful of people are used to voice everything – and most of those people sound the same anyway. They all have that [smooth-voiced] style that no one actually speaks in or they’re the really, really happy female who sounds Botoxed to within an inch of her life.”
It’s no surprise then that most of us lunge for the dial when the ads come on. But occasionally one will catch our interest, such as the winner of this year’s Siren radio advertising awards. The commercial, for a bladder weakness pad, consisted of 25 seconds of a woman’s infectious chortling with a simple ”feel free to laugh” message at the end. (To provoke genuine laughter, the advertisement’s director got a colleague of the woman to moon her.)
Some advertisers, however, eschew traditional ads in favour of hiring a host to read a script about their product. The theory is that listeners will think the program has resumed when they hear the host’s voice and will pay more attention (and that the host’s ”likeability” may rub off on their product). But these ”live reads” tend to backfire when the presenters sound uninvolved.
”Most of the time, the hosts are talking about things they’re passionate about and that comes across,” van Dijk says. ”But then they get handed a piece of paper and they give this wooden, unenthusiastic delivery.
”To go from [the supposed Labor leadership contest] Rudd v Gillard to ‘My, this coffee has such a fine blend of arabica beans’ sounds clunky and awkward. And all the listener is thinking is, ‘Poor bugger, being forced to talk about something he doesn’t want to.’ The problem is that people don’t actually listen to radio ads. They listen to what interests them – and only sometimes that’s an ad.”
mlallo@theage.com.au Source: The Age Ralph spoke to us about 12 months ago about the same thing, about bringing every day life into radio ads to entertain the listener.
I wonder if anyone listened, either we tried & just forgot or the client just wasn’t interested…
The battle continues..
Follow Ralph on Twitter http://twitter.com/ralphvandijk