I think nine out of ten commercials on the radio are really bad. It’s like there are a handful of commercial models and advertisers just plug their product into that commercial template. Here are the ones I seem to hear on a regular basis:

• The Endorsement: Someone (celebrity or not) talks about how great the product/service is.
• The Conversation: Two or three people having an overly informative (and very fake sounding) conversation about a product/service.
• The “We’re Awesome”: This is the standard commercial where the announcer talks about how the product/service is the best one you can get. They think they’re awesome and they’re going to tell you why they think they’re awesome and why you should think they’re awesome.
• The Owner: The owner/founder/president of the company talks about the product/service. This one is really a variation of the “we’re awesome” commercial, just from the owner/founder/president’s own mouth.

I’m sure there are more radio commercial templates but these are the few that come to mind. Maybe Chris can give me more…he’s in that business. What I have noticed more and more is the inclusion of the company’s website in radio commercials. Rather than repeating the company phone number numerous times in the 30 seconds, they repeat the website address. Strategically, that’s a great move. It’s easier to remember a website address than a ten digit phone number.

I’m not sure how many people actually visit a website after they hear it on a radio commercial and I’m not going to get into whether or not I think that’s an effective use of marketing dollars (I think it depends on a lot of factors actually.) My concern today is that there are a lot of ads pushing people to websites that are just really bad and conceivable to more harm than good and therefore undermining the time and money that went into the original ad.

A bad website is like pornography. You might not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it. Even the most novice Internet user gets a sense of the site within seconds and in under a minute has formed a full fledged opinion on the site and the company the site represents. In many cases a radio commercial will simply direct you to the front page of a company’s website. In general that’s a terrible place to send people because every front page tries to cram as much information as possible. Instead, the commercial should send you to a page designed solely for that commercial, so when you visit the page the information is completely targeted to what hooked you into visiting in the first place.

Also, don’t send the listeners to a subpage within the company website. Buy a specific domain name just for advertisement. It cost you less than $10 to do it. For instance, I noticed recently that Jet Blue isn’t sending people to JetBlue.com in their new ads, rather they’re sending them to HappyJetting.com. Sure, Jet Blue could have advertised something like “Visit us at JetBlue.com/HappyJetting” but it just makes more sense to create a focused space dedicated to the new promotion entirely.

The bottom line:

1. Think twice about where you send people in your radio commercials.
2. Ask some impartial people if they think you have a bad website. If so, change it.
3. Get a highly focused webpage(s) with a unique domain name is too easy to do and may very well make all the difference in the success of a radio campaign.

Tags: Happy Jetting, Jet Blue, radio ads, radio commercials

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 8:09 am and is filed under radio advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.