Radio Silence

There are some typical strategy’s some people employ to grab the listeners attention in a radio commercial. The stuff of clichés. Explosions, lasers, booming male announcer voice. I find that the opposite is actually true. There is no louder sound on a radio station than silence. Radio is a companion service. Every programmer for the past 100 years has feared dead air.  A century of outright aversion makes radio silence a very powerful tool for your business. It’s a pretty common reaction to look at your radio when it suddenly goes quiet.  I’m not talking about airing dead air for 28 seconds and tagging the ad with your business name. But, there are a lot of ways to make it work for you. Here’s a few...
 

Cold Reads – Sometimes you don’t even need to go to direct absolute silence to get attention. It can be very powerful to run a message with nothing except the human voice to propel it. It’s not always necessary to have a music bed accompany the voice over. Try to consider what the other commercials will sound like in a regular stop set. Will yours rise above the others? How will it emerge from the pack? One easy way to stand out is to go with a cold read. The style is rarely used. A cold read becomes even more powerful when you use good...

Pacing – Radio scripts are almost always overwritten. Writers and business owners try to cram too much copy into a 30 second allotment. This results in a fast paced, bad commercial. Your listeners won’t be able to keep up with the message. Remember that people aren’t usually actively listening to commercial breaks. You need to give them reason to clue in. Tossing a lot of information at them is a sure way to keep them tuned out. A slowly paced, cold voice commercial is a different story. Let the message breath. Leave long pauses to emphasize important points. Any details you don’t include can be incorporated as enticing hooks to make people remember you and find you. Keep the message simple. Respect the listeners time. They don’t want to be bombarded with jargon. Give them one good reason to remember you and make it sound different than the commercials that will air before and after your message.

Uncomfortable Pauses – Don’t be afraid to incorporate uncomfortable pauses in your messages. 3 seconds of silence is an eternity on the radio. It can punctuate and important point more than any words. Conversely, silence can be an important element to use before an important statement. The reason being, people take notice when the radio goes dead. What better time is there to hit someone with an interesting pitch?

This all comes back to the main thing you need to do with your commercials. Make people listen, and hook them with a powerful message. Silence is powerful because it’s underused. If half of the commercials on the air used this as a technique, it wouldn’t be effective. But, for now, it’s a great strategy to use in your next ad.