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Things We Don't Want To Hear In A Radio Ad (Parts 1 and 2)

Things We Don't Want to Hear in a Radio Ad (Part 1) from Radio Mercury Awards on Vimeo.

Things We Don't Want to Hear in a Radio Ad (Part 2) from Radio Mercury Awards on Vimeo.

Radio Inspiration from Oink Ink

I still love to write radio. I know that seems like an incredibly old school medium. But I love writing it. And I love hearing my spots on air (or Pandora or Spotify or wherever).

When you write a TV spot, you end up hiring a director and a production company and soon about 150 are working on an idea you came up with. And that's a cool feeling.

With digital projects, the process is less elaborate. But you still have programers and designers and UX experts who come together to bring your idea to life.

But with radio, it's most likely just you, a few actors, and your sound engineer. If it misses the mark, it's all on you. If it's great, same thing. I love the pressure. I love the collaboration. I love that you're more of a SWAT team than an army.

Here's a little inspiration for you radio writers: the radio reel for Oink Ink. They're a great shop I got to work with a while back. If you ever get to work with them or even enter their Dead Radio Contest, you'll have a good time, too. Enjoy.

2013 Radio Mercury Award Winners

The Radio Mercury Awards have just been announced. Click here to listen to the winners.

Radio is still a writer's medium. It's awesome to have an A-list director and a crew of 100 working on your TV or video spot. It's really cool to see top designers and programers bringing a web site or an app to life. But it's equally amazing to sit down with a small team of a producer, a sound engineer, and some great talent to pull off something like this.

How to Start Writing Scripts

As a junior with very little script writing experience, I found it challenging to get into the spot. I'd have an idea for a spot. But getting to that idea always seemed clunky.

Recently, I was invited to speak to a class at the Temerlin Advertising Institute at SMU, and we talked about writing scripts for radio and TV. Here's an exercise we did together.

First, watch this classic SNL clip.

Okay. Now, take out a piece of paper and write the first sixty seconds of this skit. It's not a memory game; you don't need to remember the kids names. But how did the skit begin? Go ahead, try it.

When you come up with a great idea for a TV spot, it's a lot like saying, "What if Chris Farley were a crazy motivational speaker who really lives in a van down by the river?" It's a funny concept. But that's not the first line of the script. You have to begin with "Open on a living room." And you have to write some dialogue that's not all that funny, or even memorable. But it gets you to the funny and memorable part.

As you watch TV - sitcoms, dramas, commercials - pay attention to how they begin. What are the first lines spoken? What is the first image you see? Figure out how how those elements serve as a base, and how they lead to the parts you really remember.

7 Rules for Writing Radio

Writers and art directors, here is what I would like to tell you about radio:

Radio is usually :30 or :60. Time your scripts accordingly. (This applies to TV, too.)
When timing your scripts, read it aloud, and read it slowly. Don't kid yourself. Read slow.
If your script comes in at :32 seconds, don't tell yourself you'll just have the talent read it faster. Edit. Even if it hurts.
Rule of thumb: 80 words for a :30, and 155 for a :60.
Find the little ways of making your spot real. If your spot takes place in bed, consider having the talent lie down while they read your script. If they're supposed to be tired and sweaty, have them do jumping jacks before each take. If they turn their head away from the person they're talking to, have them turn their head away from the microphone.
Make sure your script goes somewhere. Don't just tell the same joke three times in sixty seconds. If it's not building, it's not award-winning.
Great art directors can (and do) help create great radio. Radio is visual. Ergo, art directors can help create great radio.

2011 Mercury Finalists Announced

Finalists for the Radio Mercury Awards were announced today. To listen to the spots, click here.

Here are just a few things that continue to fascinate me about radio:

You can do anything. Anything you want the listener to see, they will see. And because they're creating the images, they'll see it perfectly.
While it's fun to collaborate with a director, a line producer, a full film crew, cast, an editor and a music house to produce a piece of film, it's just as fun to work with a sound engineer, and some talented actors to make something just as memorable.
There's no medium where a writer can have this much control and this much fun.
That said, the very best art directors I've worked with knew how to make great radio, cared what it sounded like, and had their names on the credits.
You get about 80 words for a :30, and 155 for a :60. Radio was Twitter before there was Twitter.

Radio Mercury Awards Workshop

If you're a writer, and you'll be in the LA area on July 14th, you should go to this.

I went to one of these workshops as a junior writer. Well worth the money. Especially, since my agency paid the bill - something you might want to look into yourself.

Honesty in Radio

You’ve got to be honest with yourself when you write a script.

Take out a stopwatch. Don’t rush your read. Allow for breathing room. Fix what’s not working. (That doesn't mean read it a little bit faster.)

If you don’t time your script honestly...

You will have to ask the talent to read faster than he or she should.
You will end up doing multiple takes, hoping by some miracle the read comes in under time.
You will get a poorer performance from the talent.
You will end up having to scramble to figure out which words and phrases to cut from the script.
You will risk having to explain to the client why certain words or phrases had to be cut.
You will look unprofessional in front of your creative director, your producer, the engineer, and the talent.

If you do time your script honestly...

You will realize what’s not working and have plenty of time to fix it.
You will have an easier recording session.
You will have a better script.

It's really hard to kill a line you love to make the script time out right. But it's better to kill it early and have time to top it or work it in some other way than to have to do it under pressure in the recording studio.

Radio On! Creative Workshop

The Radio Mercury Awards are hosting the Radio On! Creative Workshop in New York on February 9th. Should be great. Sign up or get more info here.

Radio Lessons from Ira and Alec

If you listen to NPR, you probably heard some of their Alec Baldwin spots during their most recent pledge drive. The spots were written and produced by Ira Glass. They don't time out to clean a :30 or :60. But they're still pretty good examples of announcer-driven radio. To hear them, click here.

"Don't Give" is my favorite.

Radio Word Counts

Something I learned from Tom Goudie at Pirate Radio in Toronto years ago:

A 30-second radio spot should have a word count under 80.

A 60-second spot should be under 155.

Don't kid yourself by reading your script a little faster. That never works once you're in the studio.

The Radio Mercuries are here! The Radio Mercuries are here!

A One Show annual costs about $60.

A Cannes reel is a little over $700.

But you can download the best radio of the last year right here for free.

(And if you're not convinced radio's relevant to your career, read this.)

Running Short

If you’ve ever run track, you’ll probably agree that the hardest race is the 400 meter dash. It’s running as fast as you possibly can, one quarter mile around the track. Absolutely grueling.

In high school, one of the guys on our team was a contender for the state championship in the event. He won every meet and came close to breaking the state record almost every time. So to help him prepare for the state finals, the coach took him off the 400 meter event and made him run the 800 meters – probably the only race worse than the 400.

The coach (who’d been a 400 meter state champ himself) knew that after conditioning this kid’s mind to run for 800 meters, running the 400 in the qualifying tournament would seem like a piece of cake.

Turns out it worked. The kid went on to win the state championship, and break his own coach’s state record.

Here’s how this applies to you writers and your radio scripts: Start writing 30-second radio scripts instead of 60s.

It’s tough to get a script to fit into 60 seconds. But squeezing a great idea into 30? That’s almost torture.

Sure, 60’s are standard. But I’m seeing a lot of clients who are buying 30s – especially in this economy. Some clients buy them because they’re less expensive. Some buy them based on media buyer’s recommendations. And some buy them because they don’t believe in or care about radio.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do great 30 second radio. Just visit the Radio Mercury Awards site and hear what I mean.

:30s and :60s are different beasts. What works in one might not work in the other. But practice writing a few. Because if you can write a fantastic :30, you’re going to be that much better at writing :60s. Not to mention TV spots, headlines, and concepting in general.

Radio Lessons from a Young Creative

When I was a young creative, I wrote a radio spot that had my CDs and our clients laughing out loud. What made it funny was the way I read it. When we went into production, we tried to find an actor who could read it as well as I did. We found a guy who was pretty close. But it wasn’t exactly how I read it. And it just wasn’t as funny.

LESSON 1:

If you’re the best person for a spot, jump in the studio after the talent has left and try it yourself. I wish I had. And I’m sure Andy Azula is glad he did.

Working with that talent, he began to read the client information with a kind of newscaster feel. This wasn’t the intention at all. But it was something the client picked up on, and urged us get more of. I was a very young and eager-to-please creative. But we ended up with a radio spot that sounded nothing like the one I’d originally presented.

LESSON 2:
Stay true to what you want. Don’t let clients or even your own producer steer you in a direction you know you don’t want to go. You want a director or a producer to plus the script – to give you something cool you weren’t expecting or even asking for. But if you don’t know exactly what you want going in, you’re probably not going to get your best stuff.

When this spot was finally produced, the client was very happy. But I wasn’t. And even though he didn’t say anything, I don’t think my CD was, either.

My art director partner – who was involved in the concept, but not in the production – told my CD, “It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be.” In a kind, mentoring way, my CD told her, “Then maybe you didn’t do your job.”

LESSON 3:
Radio doesn’t need to be a writer’s-only club. Radio is visual. You can’t tell me art directors have a roll to play. Here is one of my favorite radio spots – co-written by an art director.

Radio Thursday 5/28

Quite honestly, I look for an element of “We can’t do that on the radio, can we?” Even if the commercial is just a single voice and serious, I look for some element of honesty or truth or execution that is mischievous. To me, big, subversive ideas are the key to great radio. The best commercials leave me with a sense of “I can’t believe they got away with that.”

Radio Thursday 5/21

Paul Ruta believes you should write what you believe is a good script for the length of your spot, then prune the words by half. “It’s incredible how little it takes to fill 30 seconds.”

Radio Thursday 5/14

The stuff that works is the stuff that you don’t expect. Well-observed real moments are the source of great writing and great advertising. So watch people yourself and write what you see. Then you’ll never have to write another quiz-programme, courtroom-scene, phone-in, psychiatrist-and-patient or film-trailer pastiche as long as you live and the world will sound a lot better.