Radio adverts

[Cudzoziemiec]

Why are they so crap? I'm being subjected to Classic FM, a station I find irritating for a number of reasons, one of which is the adverts. It's not just that they interrupt the broadcasting, they are mostly dire. They show none of the inventiveness that can be found in TV adverts or even press and billboards. Why? They sound exactly like they did in the 80s on local radio, when understandably small, local businesses had limited budgets and resources. Now radio advertising for nationwide brands on a national station does not seem to have developed at all in thirty years.

[Kim]

I suppose there's a much more limited scope for innovation in 20 seconds of audio, and the "that bloody advert again" effect is probably just as effective^[1] as a genuinely funny comedy sketch or a particularly insidious earworm.

Classic FM in particular suffers (well, I assume it still does - it's been a while) from the mental gear crunch effect of going from a piece of peaceful music to someone reading out financial small print as quickly as possible.

That said, there's something strangely pleasing about super-local low budget radio adverts.  Probably because it hasn't changed since the 80s, like those slides you used to get in cinemas advertising the local curry house etc.

(Is Radio Jackie still going?  I listened to that for a while, back in the days when streaming was new and exciting, and everyone else was playing the same music as Crapital FM^[2].  There was something strangely exciting about listening to a local radio station for completely the wrong place, too.)


_{[1] Advertising effectiveness tends to be measured by how well the brand scores in "name n makes of $thing" surveys, which doesn't always translate to sales.
[2] They probably still are.}

[Mr Larrington]

Listen to Kiss FM and you'll never complain about the addypoos again.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I'm only picking on Classic FM because the commercial station I hear most of. I presume that the ads are similar on other (national) stations, with the probable exception of composed.com (some sort of DJ Random for classical music). Local ads have the right to display local standards.  Which reminds me of a station in Bradford, early 90s: it was in Bengali, but the ads gave their phone nos in English. Probably there were both marketing and linguistic reasons for this.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

I think it's because there's no visual, so they have to make the ads memorable just through sound, and the easiest way to do that is to make them so irritating you want to hurl the radio out of the nearest window. Ads are the reason I don't listen to commercial radio. I tune out ads on telly easily enough but the radio ones are unbearable.

[Kim]

I don't listen to radio any more (other than the odd programme on iPlayer) because barakta starts whatting at people who aren't in the room.  But in an age when you can get up-to-date news in text form and listen to whatever music you like without some twonk talking over the end of it, commercial radio appears to be reduced to giving people in shared offices something more annoying than the thermostat to argue about, and entertaining people in traffic jams.

Neither of those demographics seem particularly inclined to turning off because the adverts are crap.