Do You Have the Skills to Craft Great Ads for Your Clients? - by Roy H. Williams

The following is reprinted with permission from the October 24, 2011 issue of Radio INK magazine.  There is no substitute for getting the message right.  A great commercial (defined as one that evokes the desired response by the listener-consumer) trumps all other considerations—format, audience demographics, reach, even frequency (not to diminish the importance of these).  -RS

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   Great ads are made from great ingredients. Would you rather wrestle with your client up front and get great ingredients before the ad airs, or apologize to your client when a bloodless ad falls flat?

   Good consultants are also made of good things. Are you made of good ad-writer stuff?

   Do you have:

1. Courage to speak the truth?
The offer made by the advertiser matters more than the schedule, the audience, or the station’s format. Do you have the courage to tell your advertiser that their offer is weak? A powerful offer heard just once on a small station will always outperform a pointless offer heard repeatedly on a big one.

2. Clear eyes?

Can you see beyond the wishful thinking and enthusiastic delusions of your clients? Sadly, many radio salespeople are parrots, happily squawking into the microphone whatever their clients would most like to hear said about their businesses. Can you maintain a healthy degree of doubt about your client’s message? Can you see your client as the public sees them? Fall under the spell of the client’s perspective and you’ll find yourself on the inside with the client, looking out — and you’ll no longer have the ability to think like your client’s customer. The best ad writers empathize with the public, not with the client.

3. Curiosity?

You must ask insightful questions to uncover unusual answers. “Of all the things you’ve ever done in advertising, what has worked best for you?”

4. Piercing perception?

You must find an offer, a message to the public, that the public will judge to be interesting. You are looking for a diamond in a dark hole, deep underground. The client keeps offering you dirt clods and telling you they’re diamonds. You are surrounded by tons of dirt, and you know there’s got to be a diamond in here somewhere. But where? Do you have the patience to find it? Do you have the audacity to speak a diamond into existence when it wasn’t there before? Sometimes your client will agree to a powerful offer they never thought about making. Do you have what it takes to suggest it?

5. Brevity?

Clever is not a substitute for clear. Clarity is the new creativity. Shorter is always better.

6. A love for literature?

Do you read a lot? And I don’t mean websites. Great writers read the works of great authors and allow those flavors to coat their tongues. Hemingway, Steinbeck, Tom Robbins, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Frost. As you read, so will you write.

7. Humility?

Confidence and humility are not opposites. Confidence without humility is arrogance. Humility without confidence is an inferiority complex. Have the confidence to suggest an experiment. Have the humility to admit what you learned when an assumption proves to be wrong.

8. A conscience?

Focus on helping the client, not on making the sale. Know that you can make a difference. Ask questions. Develop ideas. Do experiments. Report results honestly. Become a sustaining resource. Make sure that access to airtime isn’t the only thing you have to offer. Real confidence comes from actual experience.

But keep in mind that clients are never pleased to hear that you’d like to try something that’s never been done. So if there is a word to remember, that word is “experiment.”

If you and your client decide to perform an “experiment,” it’s a guaranteed-win situation because experiments always deliver valuable information you did not previously know. The cost, the time limit, the process, and the information you seek are all agreed upon in advance. “What did we learn?” is the sacred question that must be answered at the conclusion of every experiment, even when the only honest answer is, “Well, we certainly learned never to do that again.”

The truth of good consulting is this: Any fool can tell a client what to do, but only a consultant of true experience can tell a client what not to do.

You’re going to make mistakes. Own them. Don’t try to bluff your way out of them. And always get buy-in from the client when you’re not 100 percent certain of what the outcome is going to be. It’s not just your experiment and it’s not just theirs; it’s both of you, together. Agree upon what you’re going to do, what you hope will happen as a result, why you believe this experiment makes sense, and then, together, make peace with the possibility of the worst-case scenario.

As much as we try to make advertising a science, it cannot become one as long as language and human choice are involved.

 

“Experiment.” That’s the word.

 

And welcome to the big leagues.

Roy H. Williams is president of Wizard of Ads Inc.