Don't Put Music in Your Radio Ad

By Mike McDaniel

There are lots of no-nos for building a successful radio commercial, but the big no-no is music.

From the smallest half watt radio station in East Cupcake to the giants of Metropolis, there are people hired to make radio commercials, and most of them think they should put music in the background.

DUH! Most radio stations play music, so when your commercial shows up with music, it blends right in with the station format. The idea is for your ad to stand out and get attention, not fade into the wallpaper. Music behind an announcer reading your commercial serves no purpose.

That might have been too subtle. Let me put it another way. Music behind an announcer reading a radio commercial is really dumb!

Worse yet, there might be a law against it. When you hear a familiar song in a radio commercial, specially if the commercial was produced locally (as opposed to the Motel 6 commercials) you can almost bet the happy mouth at the station pulled a favorite song to ad "zip" to the commercial. Any song in a commercial, no matter how old or popular, requires a special performance license. If you want James Brown or Doris Day singing in your ad, or if you want Booker T and the MGs going thumpty thump back there, you gotta pay the piper. And it ain't cheap.

ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers is the biggest music licensing agency. Radio stations pay ASCAP a percentage of all the money they make every year to have the legal right to plan tunes on the air, and that doesn't include playing them in commercials.

In fact, the ASACAP people are on the lookout everywhere for unlicensed use of their material. If an ACSAP snoop is put on hold and your music on hold system has a popular tune playing, you can expect a letter in the mail which could lead to a lawsuit. If the part time band down at the twist and shout has not paid for the music they belt out, another letter. If your radio in the store is a fancy model with more than two speakers, you need a music license to turn it on! At last look, ASCAP was the single biggest user of the federal court system. And you can't win. If you play it and they hear it, dig deep, the fines are sizeable. They have been know to prevent radio stations from playing any music when they get behind in their payments to ASCAP, virtually putting them out of business.

Don't play music in your radio commercial unless you own it, wrote it and performed it, or bought the rights from a music licensing agency. Really effective commercials don't rely on music to do the selling anyway, success is all in the words said. Ease their pain and the advertiser gains.

The number one rule of advertising, sell the benefits. Not "best plumber in town" that's a feature, but "We show up on time and smell good or you don't pay".. that's a benefit. Music won't help get that point across.

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