Radio ads require repetition to work. A minimum run of at least fifteen ads on one station during a one-week period is recommended. Furthermore, if your entire advertising run on a particular station will be less than sixty spots during a month, try to keep the ads within a particular time slot. This way you will reach the same listening audience during each spot or often enough to create an awareness and ideally a desire to buy or inquire about your product or service. If your spots run on an erratic schedule, you might reach the full listenership of the station but you won’t be reaching any one group of individuals often enough to motivate them to take action.

A great way to zero in on the same people and have added impact is to buy a sponsorship of a daily feature, such as a news or sports broadcast. A sponsorship guarantees your ad will run at a particular time and typically affords you a brief “sponsored by” message in addition to your ad spot.

Errors and rip-offs
New advertisers are often suspicious as to whether or not their ads have run correctly or even run at all. Advertising salespeople respond by saying “No need to worry, our ads are recorded in our operating log as required by the FCC. To not run an ad would violate the law.”

Don’t believe the salespeople for a minute. One of the very largest Boston radio shows was subject to a major scandal a few years back because they were skipping clients’ ads on a regular basis, logging the spots and billing the clients as if all of their spots had run as per contract.

While skipped ads are fairly uncommon, they can happen—and happen to you. What is a lot more common, however, is an unsatisfactory ad presentation. This is most likely to occur if all or part of the ad is read by on-air talent.

For example, in running a series of ads that included changing short live taglines on six major radio stations, I discovered that only one station read the ad correctly. Most made significant errors in the live taglines. Some actually skipped the tagline altogether. Some ran the wrong ad on the wrong day. One station even ran half of the recorded version of an ad, abruptly cutting it off midway through the spot.

You need to monitor your ads to assure that you are getting your money’s worth of exposure. And don’t hesitate to demand free spots, called make-goods, for significant goofs.

Roadblocks
If your audience is fairly general and you have successfully tested radio ads on one station, you may want to consider running ads on many stations at the same time. The practice of airing television or radio ads on several stations simultaneously is called a roadblock. The advantages of this strategy are that you get multiple exposure, reach those people who frequently switch stations, and are more likely to benefit from word-of-mouth or viewers talking you up after the ads have run.

I once did roadblock advertising in the Boston marketplace and saw newsstand sales of a local magazine I was publishing almost double during a two-week period. I also saw the sales slide back toward their former level about a month after the ads stopped running.

As the results of my campaign show, radio ads tend to work best for advertisers who can concentrate a lot of money in one marketplace, with heavy concentration over an extended period of time.

Let’s make a deal
The real fun in radio advertising is negotiating rates. Try to wait until a slow season, then call every station that meets your demographics. Tell them either how much money you are considering spending on their station or how many spots you intend to place. Also tell them nicely, but firmly, that you are only going to run ads on the station or stations that give you the best rate deals. Get one or more of them to show you their ratings book, ideally from Arbitron, and compare how many people in your target audience they will be reaching.

Get all of the bids from each station. Then call each station back and say you still haven’t decided which station to choose, and can’t they do any better?

If you choose a slow time of year and are persistent but pleasant with people, you should be able to negotiate rates that are even lower than the those paid by large national advertisers that buy huge blocks of advertising time.

You will be amazed to see how much less than the published rate card price you can buy radio time for. You will also note that, from radio station to radio station, there is an enormous difference in the station’s willingness to negotiate.

For example, a Boston station, which normally sold morning drive ad spots at $150 per second, sold me a package deal costing only $10 per spot. What you should typically expect through negotiating, however, is half the published rate. If you can do this, you are doing great!