Sirens Gold award winner and tips from Radio Creative workshop: Audio

At the Siren Award breakfast this morning in Melbourne, advertising agency Clemenger BBDO was presented with the 2010 Gold Siren award for best radio ad of the year. Speaking at the breakfast CRA’s Joan Warner noted that four out of five Siren winners have been from Melbourne, and that the Siren Awards have great support from Melbourne agencies. The breakfast was followed by a creative workshop presented by Ralph van Dijk, who shares some of his tips for good copywriting with radioinfo readers.

 

The winning ad, called “Clothes” for Tena absorbent hygiene products, was written by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne’s Julian Schreiber and Tom Martin. The same ad also won a Silver Siren for in the single advertisement category from a total of nearly 600 entries to the awards this year.

Schreiber was also one of the writers of the winning Gold Siren Award in 2008 for RACV Financial Services called “Disclaimer”. It is the third time the agency has won the top gong in the six years of the Awards.

The winning Tena ad uses humour to promote pads designed for weak bladders. Award judge, John Mescall commented on the treatment in the winning ad: “What I loved about the Tena work is how it took a pretty sensitive subject matter and delivered a benefit, with a brand of humour that was empathetic to the target audience. When you put the words ‘humour’ and ‘incontinence pads’ together in the one sentence, in the wrong hands it would be a recipe for disaster. Not so here,and a very worthy winner.”

 

Listen to the Gold Siren winning ad here.

 

The winners of the industry’s annual awards for creative excellence in radio advertising will automatically be entered into the Cannes Radio Lions to be held next month at the Cannes Advertising Festival and the winning writers receive two free tickets to France for the event.

 

Winner of the Silver Siren for the campaign category was the “Glee Launch Campaign” for Network Ten, written by Ten’s Andrew Garrick. The campaign promoted the launch of Glee, a musical comedy series now screening on Network Ten.

Award judge Rem Bruijn described the ad as having “amazing talent, great production [and] massively entertaining.“
The other Silver Siren winner  was an ad for HBF, called “Passenger” which won the 2010 craft category. The ad was produced by sound engineer Paul Taylor from production studios, Eardrum and Sound Reservoir in Sydney.

 

Today’s breakfast was hosted by Ant and Becks, the new drivetime duo on ARN’s Mix101.1 in Melbourne and Mix106.5 in Sydney and was followed  by a one-day, hands-on workshop on how to make great radio ads.

 

Ralph van Dijk

At the workshop Eardrum’s Ralph van Dijk,  pictured right,  presented creatives  with a  range of tips and tricks to write better radio ads.

Some of the top tips he presented to workshop participants are:

 

  • Think of an idea first, then start writing.
  • Remember, the listener is doing something else, so make the ad work in that environment
  • Convince the client to think like a listener, not a client
  • Write scripts that sound real and get talent that sounds real to read them
  • Give the ad space to breathe, use silence, minimise the number of words in the script and make each word count
  • Record the voiceover tag last and let the VO hear the previous part of the ad so they can react to it in their read.
  • Suggest, don’t preach.

 

 

 

Click below to go to the Siren Awards newly revamped website.