The Importance of Music

When you produce radio commercials, one of the toughest decisions you face is whether to use music, and if you do, what music to use. At least it should be a tough decision. You should devote as much care and consideration to choosing an underscore as you do to every other step in the production process, including copywriting. In fact, writing with a specific piece of music in mind is a useful way to overcome a creative block and to make sure your message is on target. The spot below was written specifically for the music. In other words, I chose the music first and then wrote the story.

 

Music—or the lack thereof—is absolutely vital to producing engaging radio. The “radio commercials are supposed to have music, so I’ll throw any old bed under this voiceover and call it done” attitude is unacceptable. Every piece of music you use should serve a purpose.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the power of silence. Music can, and should, be used in the same way. Music can evoke a desired mood. The right bed can lend a humorous touch, or help create drama or suspense. Choosing the right music will help you produce spots with emotional impact. Emotional impact is essential to your primary goals: entertaining your audience and delivering results for your clients.

Opposites

Last week I wrote about opposites and gave an example of how you can use them in ad copy. Here’s another example.

If you work in radio long enough, you’ll be asked to do spots for every type of business imaginable. The commercial below is one I wrote and produced a few years ago for a portable toilet supply company. It was one of those occasions when the account rep came in with little more information than: “Can I get a spot by tomorrow? They do port-a-johns. Oh, and make it a :60.”

So as I sometimes do when I need an idea but don’t have much time, I started thinking about opposites. In this case, I focused on music. What music is the polar opposite of what you’d expect to hear in a commercial for portable toilets?

Listen:

 

I think this commercial works for a couple of reasons. First, the juxtaposition of the music with the subject matter makes the spot humorous and memorable. I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a comedic writer. Sometimes it happens by accident. The content is mundane (if not objectionable to some), but the music makes the ad entertaining enough to hold the listener’s attention. As a radio producer, you have to do what’s right for the client and the station. You have to make your audience listen through entire stopsets. Second, there’s the psychology aspect (if you buy into that sort of thing). Carl Jung theorized on the integration of opposites and its importance to an individual’s development into a “whole.” Similarly, in a commercial like this one the listener’s subconscious reconciliation of opposites—recognizing two contradictory things as a cohesive whole—demands active cognitive engagement. And that’s what you want.

Again, the music plays the role of the opposite here. Choosing the right music—or deciding to use none at all—is absolutely vital to producing effective radio advertising and imaging.

More on that later.

 

 

Writing in Reverse

I promised in a recent post to offer some methods for generating copy ideas when you’re short on time. That was almost a month ago. My attention has been diverted during these last few hectic weeks, but the pressures of meeting deadlines despite a very tight schedule gave me plenty of opportunities to practice some of my favorite time-saving, thought-starting techniques.

When the clock is ticking and I’m out of ideas, I sometimes try to come up with an unexpected approach to the copy by thinking about opposites. There are lots of ways to do this, more of which I’ll share in future posts, but the example below is an idea I picked up years ago from Jeffrey Hedquist. (I may have even pilfered some of the script verbatim. I honestly can’t remember.) The spot is for a local music store. The strategy is to emphasize the business’s strengths by deconstructing the things that make it different and special. That is, think backward. Do the opposite of what you’d normally do. (Beyond the copy itself, note the absence of music. In a commercial for a store that sells music.)

Listen:

 

This is a simple, effective—and unusual—way to spotlight your client’s competitive advantage. You can’t use this exact method very often, but maybe it will work for you sometime when you’re stuck.