Ever since we interned at a radio station and were asked to record an ad – and were subsequently reduced to tears of pressure after countless orders to “sound sexy, more, come on!” only for the final result to be deemed “too sexy” and scrapped completely – we fell in love with radio. A strange, passionate, love-hate, kind of love. So it was with great pleasure that we made our way to one of Arabian Radio Network’s (ARN) RADIOlogy creative workshops, led by “international radio commercial guru” Ralph van Dijk.
“Radio advertising drives desire, it creates the ‘want,’” said van Dijk. Our spark for radio was well and truly alive. Speaking to a room of six, including agency insiders and yours truly, van Dijk was like a counselor, reading out one bad radio script after the other, identifying the problems, working through them, all the while probably resisting the urge to laugh out loud. Van Dijk is diplomatic, no doubt.
Having visited the region three years ago to judge the Dubai Lynx Awards, van Dijk says the Middle East has “a big upside.”
“Radio suffers everywhere in the world,” he says. “It’s a medium that’s often ignored or relegated, so creatively there’s an awful lot of education that needs to be done. I think the difference in this region is that commercial radio has come a little bit later, so there’s the opportunity to start with getting some good habits now. Ads are still pretty direct; they’re assuming the listener is interested, before they’ve invested any work in trying to peak their interest.”
Present at the workshop with Communicate were a couple of agencies that shall remain anonymous at their request. They brought in some of the radio scripts they’d done for clients. Cue the usual finger pointing, where the client is blamed for the lack of creativity in radio spots. Perhaps it’s not all the clients fault, however; one advertiser at the event even said: “If you’re not the loudest, you are not heard.” This went directly against everything van Dijk was preaching.
“Define what it is your brand stands for,” he explained. “If you are the largest electronics shop in the region, you have to be confident; there is no need to shout. … Just the way your store has differentiated itself, so should your radio spot. Your radio ad should be your shop window. … We must put ourselves in the place of the listeners, and start feeling like a listener, not an advertiser.”
Van Dijk read aloud a radio ad script promoting a camera, which a certain retailer ran for three consecutive months, five times a day. It read like an instruction manual.
“That’s just not a real conversation,” said van Dijk. “People don’t talk like that. You have to use real language, and bringing in natural dialogue is so important. We treat our listeners like they’re idiots sometimes.”
So we asked van Dijk: How would you advertise Communicate without speaking to listeners like they’re idiots? “The good thing is, your magazine is really defined,” he said. “You’re talking to the most cynical, creative people, who really think they are the crème de la crème. They know international trends, they are worldly wise, and they think they know everything. Am I wrong?” Of course he’s not. (We’re sticking to our New Year’s resolution, see page XY.)
With our readers’ particularities as a starting point, van Dijk says he would target that, and then subvert it. “Talk to them in a way that implies, ‘We know you know everything, you don’t need a magazine like ours, you know it all. In fact, why even bother picking it up?’ Something that makes them go, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not the way ads normally talk to me.’ And then say something along the lines of, ‘Communicate, for people who don’t need a magazine.’”
Perhaps we’ll try it. Repeat after us: Communicate, for people who don’t need a magazine.
With a line so endearingly subversive, it’s no wonder we fell so hard for radio so many years ago.