NEW DELHI: Noting that ‘human beings are feeling machines who sometimes think’ , international radio advertising guru Tony Hertz has said that radio advertising often fails because advertisers do not engage the emotional quotient or evoke ‘visual images’ in the mind of the listener.
Hertz who is Proprietor and Creative Director, Tony Hertz: Radio & Brand Sound, said at the India Radio Forum that it was important to understand that almost the entire advertising community was working on visuals and therefore failed when it came to radio advertising. The Creative heads are never taught the skills of radio, and there is lack of belief in radio as an advertising medium.
He also referred to disconnect between the advertiser and how people listen to the radio: for company, when alone, or habitually while driving or doing something else.
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Advertisers therefore tend to talk – or even shout in short busts – down to the listener and make the ad spots too full of information and details.
In his talk based on his book ‘The Seven Secrets of Creative Radio Advertising’ and illustrated with examples, he said it was necessary in the first place to ‘find the feeling’ that will touch the listener.
The next thing should be to create a ‘picture’ so that the content writer can write better on how this can be transferred to the mind of the listener.
It is equally necessary to think about the person – the listener – and the situation in which that person may be listening to radio at that time.
It is imperative that advertisements on radio stick to the idiom of ‘one ad one message’ as this will go down well with the listener who may otherwise be occupied while listening to radio.
There is need to ‘stand in a different place’, he said, explaining that creativity lies only in the differences in production.
The advertiser should create characters, not voices, and therefore he seldom put voice-overs in his radio ads, letting the characters do the talking.
Finally, he said radio ads can be successful only if produced with passion and an obsession for the medium.
