60 Seconds is a Waste of Time and Your Money

Back with another week of articles on the cost of advertising with WOWO Radio and related subjects.

If you’ve missed any of this series, I’ve got them all lined up here.  And more will be added as they get published.

Why am I doing this?  I get asked all the time, in a variety of ways about the cost of advertising and since I work for WOWO radio, I decided to clear up some of the mystery.  I went through the proper channels of getting my bosses permission to share this with you.

Let’s jump into why I said 60 seconds is a Waste of Time and Your Money with a qualifier, maybe.

For years, okay decades, the standard length of a radio ad has been 1 minute.  Television ads were 30 seconds. This was before the birth of the internet and the continuing shrinking of our attention spans.

Most of the advertising campaigns I created for my advertising partners included 60 second ads as the primary vehicle for getting the message out to the audience.  This goes back to my days in Detroit starting in 1986 until about 10 months ago.

What changed?

I discovered last spring that I could use a shorter messaging format and deliver ads that were just as impactful, sometimes more impactful, and it gave me a better option for being a good steward of my advertising partners money.

My “secret sauce” is Live Sponsorship advertising messages.  They are about 10 seconds long and are read live.  Sponsorships I offer are for our news, weather, traffic or sports.

This “secret sauce” will not work as well on music formatted radio stations, but it is very powerful on WOWO Radio. Here’s why:  When listeners tune into a music station, nearly anything besides music is often considered an interruption or annoyance.  Even if you don’t change the station, you are mentally thinking, “why don’t they shut up and play another song?”.  You tune out.  Yes, the ads on music stations are heard by your ears and make their way into your subconscious brain matter.  That’s why you can sing the McDonald’s  Lovin It ditty right now.

But with a news talk radio station like WOWO, listeners are tuning in to hear talk, not music.  As I’ve said before, WOWO is brain food because the listeners are feeding their brains consciously with the talk and news information.

The Live Sponsorship message format that I offer to my advertising partners is usually embedded in the midst of a newscast or weather/traffic/sports report as part of the verbiage that the trusted WOWO News/Talk personality is sharing on the radio.  It is NOT a typical commercial.

It is also not a testimonial endorsement that I talked about last week, but for the listeners it does convey some extra trust in the advertiser.

Here are a few more considerations.

• Price. These Live 10 second Sponsorship messages are at least 1/2 the price of a $100 60 second commercial on WOWO.  This means I can get the message out more frequently than if we were needing to spend the higher price tag for a minute of air time.  This also enables me to help businesses that don’t have a big advertising budget.
• Message.  Can we convey your core message including a call to action in ten seconds?  For some businesses, the answer is no.  But if the copy writer of your ads is trying to fill up 60 seconds with a bunch of generic fluff, I have an answer for you.

Besides my “secret sauce”, the live 10 second sponsorship messages; I also offer recorded versions of shorter length advertisements.  For example McDonald’s has been successfully using both 15 and 30 second radio ads for years and I have a few local advertising partners that are going this route too.

Next in our series, we’ll delve into the non-prime time options.  And please keep in mind that as I share these insider insights, my goal is to help you understand and be a better informed business and marketing person.  While we’re digging deep here, there is a bigger picture of context that it all fits in and as the weeks go by, I’ll continue to expand.  Questions? Go ahead and ask.