The anatomy of an award winning radio ad

 

Ben Clare from Clemenger, is an old hand at writing radio ads. He cut his teeth on the Kellogg’s account which placed 50% of its budget on radio.

 
“Radio became a bit of a passion for me,” says Ben. “In an industry where everything is moving towards digital and shorter and shorter increments, radio is often forgotten but is the most entertaining and the most omnipresent channel. I think we forget how much we rely on radio whether it’s at home or in the car and it’s the responsibility of a copywriter to at least make the ads somewhat entertaining which means interesting.”
 
His relationship with the Sirens began in 2009. “We flew down to Melbourne and unfortunately didn’t walk away with anything. It was our first ever awards show. We were pretty demoralised because we had high hopes.” But here he is, 10 years later with a Gold Siren in his hands for the best ad and the best campaign for Dry July.
 
“Arguably they have the most challenging job of any brand in Australia, trying to convince a nation of alcoholics to part with alcohol for a month is no easy feat.”
 
Ben’s co-wrote the ads with Celia Mortlock who was unable to attend the awards night held last Thursday at the historic Rawson pub in The Rocks. 
 
The ad series titled, Ducking Autocorrect draws a parallel between a mistake-riddled text due to spellcheck and the result of having too many drinks.
 
Before Ben explains how the ads were put together, it’s worth listening to them and reading the copy on CRA’s dedicated Sirens site.
 
When you’re creating an ad for radio, says Ben, there are a number of elements you need to bring to the table: “A compelling intro – like a good premise. You have to have great casting and great voices. That’s always somewhat difficult in a market like Australia where I feel like you hear a lot of the same voices. I would always bend my scripts around characters, particularly larger than life characters, because I feel it gives it a little bit more intrigue and interest.”
 
In this case the voice over sounds like computer-generated audio which you’d expect to be lacking in warmth and human inflection. But it does stand out from other radio ads.
 
“What we did was actually record every single word of that script individually. So, it sounds computer generated because you’re used to hearing that staccato from the likes of Siri and Alexa and Google. But we realised that it was very hard to get the nuance in tone. So, we used real humans and figured out, if you record every single word individually so that the intonation goes up and down at the end of every word and string them together, it mimics that of a smart speaker or home assistant.”
 
Yet, because the ads are so jam-packed with humorous typos courtesy of spellcheck, combined with the computer sounding v/o, it’s difficult to pick up on everything on first listen. Ben admits, “It does probably come at the expense of comprehension a little bit.” But like a great song that takes a few spins before it burns in, you’ve heard enough to make want to listen harder the next time the ad comes up.
 

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Often, the hardest part of making great radio ads and getting them to air is convincing the client that it will work. How hard was it to get this client over the line?
 
“It’s hard in a sense to convince any client to part with money for what they deem to be a creative exercise. But we’ve been on a very long journey with Dry July. They have an enormous amount of trust in us. To date every campaign that we have put forward and run for them, has been a success. We’ve built the Dry July participant base year on year, raise more money year on year. They’re very trusting client and without trust you can’t you can’t convince a client to buy anything.”

 Along with his Siren trophy Ben and another person from Clemenger BBDO along with one person from the client, Dry July, will each receive:

  • A delegate pass to the International Cannes Advertising Festival
  • Return airfares to Cannes, France
  • Accommodation in Cannes, France

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