For decades, our industry’s stopset discussion has often defaulted to focusing on the quality, not quantity of radio spots. Some broadcasters feel that ad quality is the real issue. Some allow that stopset length is a problem, but not one we can do anything about. The upshot is that neither quantity nor quality has ever gotten fixed.
I still think stopset length is the first thing that radio needs to address. I believe that we’re seeing shorter stopsets make a difference right now in some markets. I believe that the “ads are a fair trade” agreement between broadcasters and the audience was made a generation before the oldest of us, and has not been renewed by today’s potential audience — especially once broadcasters began pushing the boundaries well beyond the length of a single song.
I’ve had a few recent realizations about radio advertising. The bad ads and the bottom-feeding clients get all the attention. They are, admittedly, often my focus. But often radio advertising isn’t bad, it’s just savorless. Recently, Cumulus released a study in conjunction with Signal Hill Insights on podcast advertising. The finding that “listeners prefer funny and entertaining ads but say they currently hear more ads that communicate dry features/benefits” certainly describes my experiences with broadcast radio as well.
I recently listened to a successful major-market AC station that ran two stopsets — one six minutes, one slightly over seven. Beyond the length, there was nothing particularly angering about the break or any of the spots it contained. There were no dire PSAs. Each stopset had only one accident-attorney ad, each of them a :10-:15 second ad that ended the break. Most of the ads sounded agency-produced. The ad breaks seemed to be the same ones that were running locally, judging from the local sponsors involved. I only heard one moment that could have possibly been a clunky transition between over-the-air and the radio-station stream. In other words, this was a station mostly observing best practices.
If I were to rate the commercials I heard on a 1-5 scale, five being best, I heard mostly 2s and 3s, very few ones and nothing over a three. Most fit the Signal Hill description of “dry features and benefits.” Some ads featured narration that was slightly attitudinal in its phrasing, usually more quirky than funny. I didn’t hear any ad with a jingle, other than the now ubiquitous tag for Optima Tax Relief. I didn’t hear any ad that made me smile. I didn’t hear any ad that made me want to learn more about a sponsor.
I listened to another AC station’s six-minute break. This stopset had a few better ads. There was a Live Nation concert spot that I would have given a four, if only because of the energy level and the hit songs it included. There was an ad for Staples’s “Print Big” sale that was funny, attention-getting, and had a music bed that recalled “Shape of You.” That was a four, too, at least for the first time. (Staples ads are among those that I’ve known to repeat in the same stopset, but they didn’t here.)
Most of the music I heard was low-key, unobtrusive. In fact, a lot of it was of a piece with the production music heard in 2020 during the early months of COVID — sober, if not quite sorrowful. We’re fortunate not to be living in those exact times now, and I wondered why so many advertisers were still going for that overly earnest sound. I’d think they want to smile, too. After all, we’re all in this together.
And here’s why I think radio advertising could be drastically improved. For those of us listening on the stream, the user experience is really in the hands of a small number of sponsors. The bad local car spot voiced by the client and his family isn’t the issue; those aren’t the ones that most people are hearing. Much of what we’re hearing is coming from just a few people — Progressive, State Farm, Indeed.com, Optima, Granger, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Pfizer – although our experience is also impacted by the faulty technology that feeds us those ads more than once in a stopset.
The radio industry would do well to focus on our best sponsors, especially streaming’s biggest advertisers, on both the quality and quantity of their spots. Each new “your mother for Progressive” ad makes me laugh. It makes me smile again when I turn it up for whoever’s in the car with me. But those ads, or the well-liked “Jake from State Farm answers your ‘what ifs’” ads, don’t feel freshened enough on a regular basis for a serious radio listener. And our goal is to make every listener a serious radio listener again.
Radio’s rivals, even when they have the wherewithal to produce better ads, haven’t really tried to compete on entertaining commercials. It’s similar to how most new media entities aren’t trying to replicate radio’s entertainment package overall. Some readers will observe that users of music streaming services are used to relatively dry ads, often segued straight from and into music. But those ads, sometimes designed to be low-key, are usually in the context of much shorter stopsets. We have the brainpower to do better. Radio ads want to be noticed. Just not for the wrong reasons.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com