The Enemy Within - by Wray Ellis

    • 1373 posts
    March 24, 2015 10:21 AM PDT

    It’s Monday morning. A client has just delivered a stinging load of venom into your ear. Apparently, his radio campaign was “a failure”. You, in turn, pass this news along to the creative department, the production people and anyone else within range. The questions are always the same: Who dropped the ball? What happened? In short, who gets the blame? And sooner or later, after the questions have all been answered and the incident is just about forgotten, it happens again with a different client. It's official: You have an "enemy" lurking in the system.

    What's the client’s definition of “failure”? During a live remote for instance, the advertiser’s location may have been packed with listeners but they didn’t buy. Many clients would consider this a failure when in reality, it’s a Radio success! Radio provided the traffic through the doors. If listeners aren’t converted into buyers, that failure rests solely with the client’s staff. However, if after some sobering questions your client reports no increase - or even a decrease in activity during the campaign, you need to do some digging to track down the enemy within.

    We should all take some of the credit for this failure. It is a team effort after all. (I find blame is such a counter-productive exercise.) Several things could be at work here. It may simply be a case of the client having unrealistic expectations. Maybe the creative brief was flawed. Perhaps the client had too much script input.

    Most reps I know are conservative when estimating the expected outcome and prefer to have a client pleasantly surprised than bitterly disappointed. Even so, some advertisers only hear what they want to hear and there’s nothing you can do about that. If that’s not the case, dig deeper.

    Go back to the creative brief and look at the directives. If it’s mostly blank, you’ve found one problem already. Analyze the information. Was the approach taken appropriate for the client? Did you select a reasonable Objective? Was the Call-To-Action correct in order to achieve this Objective? Were there several CTA's? (That's never a good idea.)

    Next, look at the first script and compare it to the one that finally aired. The very first script is often the most focused and with each client revision, the idea becomes more and more nebulous. Clients know their business but few can actually improve a script rather than just cram in more words.

    If you’re still confident the problem is elsewhere, listen to the commercial. Is the music too loud? Does the announcer slur or race through the script? Is there an annoying sound effect? By now you’ve probably uncovered all the problems and can take steps to avoid these pitfalls in the future. 

    It's no fun, but by doing some reverse engineering, you should be able to determine what went wrong and avoid similar client calls in the future. Hopefully, Mondays will never be the same again.

    Thanks for your time.

    Wray Ellis - Author of "Solve The Right Problem...And Your Radio Ads Will Never Go Wrong"


    This post was edited by Rod Schwartz at March 5, 2024 12:01 PM PST