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December 04, 2006

Your Direct Response Radio Ad Failed?

Is the radio ad about you or your customer?

Sounds basic, but it's a mistake often made in advertising. Yes, even radio advertising. This is why we continuously convey to clients the importance of focusing on the benefits, not the features, in radio ads.

Seth Godin points out one of the more common examples in retail - the "Under New Management" sign. I saw one of these just the other day. I couldn't help but wonder why I should care. Then I noticed that right above the banner was a crookedly-hanging "Open" sign. The Under New Management banner drew my attention all right - directly to the fact that the new management was clueless.

As Seth put it "This is a vivid symbol of the ego-centric nature of most marketing. The sign is about the owner, not about the prospect."

Ego-centric. Verses customer-centric. Nothing new here. Just the basics of business, of advertising, of direct response advertising. It turns out that achieving profit is realtively easy - just get the fundamentals right.

Why do people put up the "under new management" signs? Because other people do. That's the fallacy of "me-too", which we've written about before in this blog. The same thing occurs in radio advertising when people make their radio ad sound like other radio ads under the false conclusion that a "good radio ad" is one that sounds like a radio ad.

Posted by Jeff Small & Brett Astor at 02:28 PM | Permalink