Emotional media: building a brand on radio

It's actually very easy to build a brand using radio in Australia. NRMA in particular did it extremely well in the 80's, with a long-running radio campaign that - gasp - won awards for the agency/Writers AND a lot of business for NRMA.

Radio is the theatre of the mind. The reason we develop a liking for so many radio personalities is that listeners are free to add their own visuals: face, hair length, style of dress, nervous tics ... the lot. The same applies to radio campaigns. On the surface there is little difference between stations until you take this into account and realise that the very difference is all in listeners' heads ... and ears.

Used creatively radio can drive sales and build brands as well as any other mainstream media. Used strategically it can deliver access to finite target audiences. Yes, Mums with kids are a crossover. And yes, Mummy's little angel may well know all the lyrics to the AMI's latest radio campaign, but like TV and print it's her role as a parent to avoid the situation.

Jingles thankfully made a graceful exit at the same time great radio campaigns did - the early 90's. It wasn't because the Writers who wrote great radio also wrote great jingles (radio jingles then were predominantly just soundtracks from TV commercials thrown on to radio, masquerading as a radio commercial). It was purely that after the 'recession we had to have' many agency clients began looking for far greater transparency and adland became rightfully nervous.

With that came an agency reaction of 'Shit! We have to trim our internal costs now if we're ever going to be able to afford 3 weeks in Cannes this year! Unload a few of the biggest salaries!!'

The greatest salaries were of course the greatest Creatives and thus, thanks to limited creative mentoring in the industry for the last couple of decades, the dearth of great radio today.

As for outdoor and ambient media, well, that's another topic ...