Who’d be a copywriter? As the wordsmith in the traditional creative duo of writer and art director, the copywriter is the one who always seems to draw the short straw. Typically, when the suit steps up to present the agency’s great new campaign ideas, the writer is little more than the person who has to come up with something to replace the ‘lorem ipsum …’ dummy body copy in the layout. Filling in the gaps. Not exactly the pivotal component of the creative discipline. We’ve lost our respect for the art of great copy and, in the process, we’ve lost our ability to write it as well.
It’s been this way for quite some time. Fully 100 years ago in an article on advertising techniques, American newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane bluntly suggested “use a picture, it’s worth a thousand words”, while in 1918 a pictorial magazine in San Antonio, Texas, declared with equal certainty that their photographic visual style was unbeatable because “one picture is worth a thousand words”.
Not the kind of stuff to make a copywriter feel good about his/her chosen profession, especially considering that access to any kind of appropriate picture has multiplied exponentially with the arrival of image libraries, YouTube, Photoshop and a hundred other digital design applications.
Now consider how all this applies to radio, and to the art of writing radio commercials. The first thing to note is that radio is the only mainstream medium in which pictures, by definition, play no role at all. Suddenly the writer is in charge. So give your art director the afternoon off, fire up the laptop, and stare at the blank screen in front of you until the drops of blood begin to form on your forehead. Get writing, because you’re on your own now, sunshine. Of course, the more ambitious among you might relish this opportunity to show what you can do flying solo, rather than as back up to that tiresome picture person.
But for many others, this is like being asked to come up with killer concepts with one hand tied behind your back. And judging by the standards of creativity evident in most radio campaigns these days, it seems that a majority of writers opt for this latter defeatist attitude rather than choosing the braver option of rising magnificently to the occasioIn some ways this is understandable. Consider the arithmetic for a moment. A well-written 30-second radio spot shouldn’t contain more than 75-80 words.
Yet we are told that by not having a picture, we are sacrificing a thousand words. So before a single word of copy has found its way on to the page, we are already in deficit to the tune of 13 30-second radio spots that we could have had instead if only we could find a way to broadcast visual material on radio. But is it a sufficient excuse for the kind of hackneyed superficial stuff that is sadly all too common on our commercial radio stations these days? Just because we only have sound to play with, should we concede that radio is inherently flawed as an advertising medium?
It gets worse (or better, depending on your viewpoint). Radio has another unique characteristic that we need to take into account: namely the fact that its lack of a visual component makes it one of the few media that can be consumed satisfactorily while doing other things – working, driving, exercising, for instance. This makes it ideal for ‘low involvement’ communication strategies that stress salience above persuasion, and yet radio can also be one of the most engaging media whose audiences welcome high levels of involvement, whether from the advertising or the editorial.
Just listen to the kind of audience participation generated by top presenters like Gareth Cliff, Redi Tlhabi and Darren Simpson, and you’ll have to agree that the lack of a visual element hardly handicaps radio at all. But to do it well, it does present a singular challenge to the copywriter, who needs to find a message and a style that work equally well whether the audience is “all ears” or is simply using radio as a background soundtrack.
Astonishingly, for a supposedly creative industry, the advertising that we end up with on radio is manifestly unoriginal, predictable and utterly forgettable. If a radio station refused to air ads that adopted any of the following overused devices and genres, they’d end up with no advertising at all. Here’s the sort of stuff that lazy writers fall back on.
Stilted tea-party conversations between earnest women who apparently can think of no more pressing topic of discussion than the next door neighbour’s motorised blinds.
Board meetings, chaired by a clueless boss, that have been specially convened in order to debate the merits of assorted HR and payroll software packages.
Advertisements in which the CEO does the voice-over in a misguided search for honesty and authenticity, but which ends up as nothing more than a really bad voice-over.
Gratuitous American accents whose only purpose is to camouflage the total absence of even a half-decent idea in the commercial.
Sales pitches in which the customer is so dim-witted that he needs the name and phone number of the company to be repeated, slowly, less than five seconds after he was first told it.
An assortment of stereotypical characters from which the cast is plucked, apparently at random: the dof oke humiliated at regular intervals by his child, his wife and probably the dog too, the streetwise Indian who can get almost anything for next to nothing, the gay guy who speaks for all retail florists… need I go on?
It costs the same to flight a bad ad as it does to flight a good one (although if I had my way I’d levy a surcharge for mediocrity) so why not go for a good one? It can only be because our industry (on both sides of the fence) is increasingly the home for risk-averse and creatively insensitive decision-makers. This ‘theatre of the mind’ stuff that people bang on about in debates about the art of writing for radio sounds alarmingly risk-laden to these cowardly managers. Better to be safe than sorry, they argue, forgetting that it needs something rather more special than the safe option in order to stand out among the 1 000+ advertisements (according to the latest Accenture research) that each and every one of us is exposed to every day.
Happily, there are still some oases of advertising excellence punctuating the barren desert that makes up 90% of today’s commercial radio landscape. Chris Marrington’s spots for the Redefine property group are hugely entertaining (helped in no small measure by excellent production values) while successfully conveying the brand’s new positioning. DDB’s massive catalogue of ads featuring the hapless Steve of “beep bank” may have annoyed some, but mostly they drew in audiences to what eventually became something of a popular soap opera, while the Mercedes-Benz brand has always been in good hands with the radio writers at Network BBDO.
But the sobering truth is that it is far easier to list the bad than the good. Perhaps we need to get our writers, and their clients, to spend some time listening to the kind of radio campaigns that win awards at Cannes. Or would that be too much like hard work?
This story was first published in a special radio supplement with the April 2013 issue of The Media magazine.
