By Jeffrey Hedquist
Radio is the most visual medium. Because your audience is creating the pictures with their imaginations, a radio commercial provides the perfect opportunity for brand comparisons, coupons, product demonstrations, even statistics...because listeners can see more clearly with their mind’s eye.
Brand comparisons: Ask your audience to examine the brand on the left and the brand on the right. Use music, sound effects, audience reactions, announcer inflections, or contrasting voices to show the differences. This will work in stereo or mono.
Coupons: Get your audience to visualize a coupon. Use the sounds of a knife, scissors, tearing, or a chainsaw to cut it out.
Product demonstrations: Show changes by using audience reactions, music slowing down or speeding up, noise or silence.
Charts, graphs, statistics: Play rising or falling tones, orchestra hits for large, a tiny bell for small, a chorus of voices for many, a handful of voices for few, a tuba for old, a power chord for new.
For Unpetroleum Lip Balm, you can hear how we contrasted products made with petroleum and those made with gentler ingredients. (Listen to it on this month’s RAP Cassette.)
Get your audience involved. The possibilities are endless.
Pick the most visual thing you can think of something that MUST be done in print or on TV, and do it on radio. It’ll be the most powerful thing your listeners have ever seen.
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© 2000 Hedquist Productions, Inc.
