I worked in commercial radio for a long time, writing and producing radio ads. Today, for some inexplicable reason, I was thinking about those ads and about how I would write them, which is really about how I thought about them. I decided to write it down.
Structure
While there were some 60 second ads (which I approached the same way), even a few 10 or 15 second ads and promos, the vast majority were 30 seconds. In my mind, I thought of them as three segments, roughly 10 seconds each: intro, middle and close. These three segments were related to the words but also to the background – music and sound effects. (Some ads, of course, were cold voice – no background, just the voice.)
There were a number of benefits to approaching it this way. The first, for me, was parameters. Granted, there was already one over-riding parameter: time. It had to be 30 seconds. (To be specific, I aimed at 29 seconds.)
I work best with rules. As arbitrary as they may be, they keep me focused. I believe in breaking rules but I also believe that in order to break a rule successfully you have to know what it is and why it’s there.
With this three part structure I imposed on myself, it helped to keep me aware of the listener. (“If I don’t do something in the script to keep their attention soon, I’ll lose them.”) My reasoning was that after roughly ten seconds of an ad, assuming people are listening, if something new doesn’t happen you will have lost their attention.
Three segments
Intro: The first part, or intro, was basically the hook. A lot depended on the kind of ad you were writing, so it could be a different kind of hook. It might be a key benefit of a product or service (“For just $9.99 you can get your own 2008 Porsche! Can such things be? You bet – but only at Bob’s Outrageously Underpriced Auto Showroom!”).
It might be a skit type of ad:
MARY: Sam! Put your pants back on!
Okay … so maybe those weren’t the best examples. But hopefully you will have gotten the idea.
There are any number of ads, so there could be any number of openings. But the point was to have something that would stand out and get someone’s attention. Once you have it, you can get down to business. The intro is like a headline. If it’s a good headline, people might read the story.
Middle: The middle is the hardest part and also the riskiest. It’s essentially the meat of the ad and is usually where a listener’s attention is lost because, to be blunt, it’s boring. If you’re fortunate and have a good client, you can focus on one thing. But more often than not you have a grocery list you have to shove into the ad. Some writers find creative solutions for this, but it ain’t easy. Using two voices going back and forth can help (depending on the kind of ad it is), as well as sound effects and music – they can help punctuate key items.
Whatever you do, however, try not to linger overly long in the middle. You want out of there fast because, as mentioned, it kills with tedium.
(This doesn’t necessarily apply to an ad that is meant to build brand awareness. With those you often have time to let the ad breathe and be more creative, primarily because the ad is intended to communicate one thing – an image.)
End: The end is exactly that: the end. Here, it’s important to reiterate the key points of the ad: what product or service it is, the key benefit, and the client name and location (or phone number – twice, if you can, for the phone number).
The story
I can’t think of any kind of writing that isn’t built around this simple structure – novels, short stories, screenplays – though for many the structure is more complex. Even the complex ones, however, are only complex because the middle is portioned off into subsections.
Keeping this in mind – all writing has a structure – helps to also remind us that everything is a story. News, novels, ads: they all tell stories. And any good story has a beginning, middle and end.
But wait! There’s more!
The above is long-winded, or so it seems to me, and I haven’t yet touched on some of the things I had intended to. So it looks like I’ll be writing a second post on this topic. Here, I’ve been focused on structure. Although a good deal of what I’ve said is nothing new to anyone who has looked into the job of writing, it all needed saying before moving on to what really fascinated me about doing radio ads: the sound.
That will be part 2.
Notes:
- When I say I think of it as three 10 second sections, this isn’t carved in stone. Often the intro may be 5 seconds, and the end will be 5 seconds, leaving more time for the tedious middle. When I had that situation, a 20 second middle, I would sometimes think of it as being two parts, or 2 subsections. However I handled it, I would focus on trying to keep it interesting, usually by breaking it up somehow.
- The tense of my headline (present) and of my post (past) are in conflict. I should fix that, but I won’t because it is all based on what I did in the past when I worked in radio but, were I to write radio ads today, I would still approach it this way. (Yes, I know. That still doesn’t excuse confused writing.)
Listen 
