At the weekend, BBC Radio 4 aired a documentary entitled Radio Sales. It covered advertising in the UK for the last 80 years from advertisers who used stations like Radio Luxembourg, through pirate radio (soon to be featured in the new Richard Curtis film The Boat That Rocked), to the launch of legal commercial radio in 1973 right up until the present day.
The programme featured lots of very good, funny, creative and even moving advertisements that have aired on UK commercial radio over the years. And it also featured a few duds.
The programmed ended with this notoriously hilarious ad for Superscreen. I’ll pause while you listen to it:
But the question remains: what happens if a station broadcasts an advert that annoys the listener? I mean one that really annoys them.
Commercial radio relies on advertising to pay the way – it wouldn’t exist without it. There’s also a fine line between running too many ads – annoying listeners – or too few and not making the station a viable business. We know listeners don’t like interruptions to their programmes, but the station wouldn’t exist without them. It’s a balance.
But once an advertising campaign has been booked, what if it turns out that the actual advert they want the station to broadcast, perhaps isn’t quite as good as it might be? Then what should a station do?
The easy answer would be to reject it and get the advertiser to either make another commercial or hand the money back. Occassionally at Absolute Radio, we do actually remake commercials for an advertiser (With national advertising as Absolute Radio tends to carry, the adverts are mostly made by third party specialist radio production companies and not by stations). For example, if the advert features a voiceover by a DJ from another station we consider to be competitive with our own, on occassion we’ll revoice the ad using one of our own station voices, or a neutral voice. This most often happens with commercials advertising new albums where radio DJs are commonly booked for voiceovers.
However, sometimes that’s not an option. And even though advertising airtime is usually booked well in advance, the actual digital file with the advert – the “copy” – might not arrive until very late in the day. Our scheduling team will tell you that sometimes we’re chasing it down just hours before it’s due to be played on air.
As a commercial radio station, we have to acknowledge that times are tough for the whole media industry at the moment. UK advertising revenues across the board fell by 10% in the fourth quarter of 2008. So it’s really difficult for anyone to be in a position to turn advertising away.
But on the other hand, if an advertisement is actually causing listeners to tune out, then that doesn’t help our business either.
It’s probably best if I avoid mention of a specific advertiser here, but there was a recent advert on Absolute Radio that did raise a few hackles and we know that some of our listeners really found it annoying (And of course here at One Golden Square, we listen to our station all day long as well, so we share the pain).
But in this instance we couldn’t remake the copy, and we simply can’t afford to turn advertisers away, yet we don’t want to annoy our listeners. It’s a catch 22. I’d be interested in your thoughts. Have you ever tuned out of a station because a particular advert has annoyed you too much?
