When I drive my car, I listen to the free-to-air commercial radio.
What free-to-air commercial radio does really well is attracting great radio jockeys, especially in prime time.
In between songs, they are funny and witty, but most of all engaging.
They make inane chit-chat somewhat interesting.
Actually very entertaining.
Basically, it makes sitting at red lights and being amongst bad drivers tolerable, which is probably the reason they employ great radio jockeys.
They are doing their job!
Being free-to-air commercial radio, there are advertisements between the songs and the chit-chat to generate revenue for the business.
And as I work in marketing and sales, I always keep an ear out around advertisement time.
Why?
So I can see what the market is doing!
In my opinion, many advertisers have no idea what they are doing, but some do.
The advertisers I want to concentrate on here are those that actually use the voice over of the radio jockeys.
It’s super smart.
Firstly, there is a marketing and sales maxim that say:
There are a few reasons for this…
Humans love to buy and hate being sold to.
We have recently seen a flood of new products, services, solutions and subsequent marketing messages (even the human body can be used as a billboard now).
But, attention is scarce and limited – prospects and customers can’t digest it all, and they distrust a lot of it.
They see on average 362 marketing messages per day.
That is approximately 100,000 marketing messages per year!
It’s impossible to take all of that information in and process it.
“Ad blockers” are on the rise to combat this situation to filter out irrelevant messages, particularly those that are marketing messages.
Cognitive psychologist George A. Miller said the human mind can only hold on average seven individual units of information in working memory at once.
99% of these messages will be missed by prospects and customers.
So, unless your marketing message stands out, as you can probably guess, it will be lost forever.
Or more specifically, standing out could me not being the same as all ads.
Which is another way of saying an ad looks like content.
I have written about this in depth here.
Native content is advertising content that looks like the non-advertising content distrusted through the same medium.
It’s hard for the discerning consumer eye to tell the difference.
Again, native content doesn’t make ads look like ads.
It’s seamless.
In addition, the radio jockeys have already built up trust with their audience over time (whether the audience has joined for the first time that day or has been loyal for years).
They build this trust by playing popular songs and being funny, witty, and engaging with conversation between the songs.
So next time you create an advertisement for something (where that is a product, service or solution or just trying got convince someone to go to lunch,) make sure your ad doesn’t look like an ad, and you’ll be more engaging a thus successful with the sale.