MONDAY RADIO COMMERCIAL SMACKDOWN: Is It Any Wonder Radio Advertising Is Held In Such Low Esteem?

Welcome to the third in a series of critiques of award-winning radio commercials — those honored as "the best of the best" by the 2007 Radio Mercury Awards.

This spot was awarded $5,000 as a "General Category Winner."

My Critique:

MONDAY RADIO COMMERCIAL SMACKDOWN: Award Winning Losers

You've heard me say this before: Award-winning radio commercials rarely are good commercials. They are radio commercials that entertain the judges.

But maybe you haven't heard lots of "award winners" and you're not sure I've been telling you the truth. So let's visit a number of spots honored as "the best of the best" by the 2007 Radio Mercury Awards.

As I selected commercials to share with you, I followed just one criterion: Was there something about the spot that stood out? Sometimes — okay, rarely — that something that stood out made it an effective commercial. More often, an entry stood out because it was so staggeringly bad.

You be the judge.

That's a very clever idea, megaphone manufacturer employees all speaking through megaphones.

But....

They didn't test this spot by listening to it over a car radio in traffic; much of it simply cannot be understood under noisy road conditions.

Also, the only picture that's painted is this company in which everyone talks into a megaphone. But there's no picture of the solution —the results — that FedEx offers. Nothing.

They could have tagged anything onto the end of this. They could have said, "We need to advertise more" or "We need to put up billboards."

Here Comes The Clue Train

If you can replace the advertiser with any other advertiser without weakening the spot, your commercial might entertain. It might win awards. But it won't make money for the advertiser.

It's a clever conceit, but it's poorly executed in terms of thinking about the end user's (listener's) experience, and it does a terrible job of demonstrating the results it actually is supposed to be selling.

But it won an award for BBDO New York.

Hey, guess what? The "Chief Judge" of that year's awards is a "Chief Creative Officer" of BBDO New York.

Golly, a Chief Creative Officer of an agency that produces entertaining crap like this — that couldn't have anything to do with the fact that so many patently terrible commercials are honored. Could it?