Radio spots, 30 or 60 seconds?

[Darkangel]

Hey gang,

With talking about radio advertisment, I know that some do 60 second spots, while others do 30, and I'm sure there are some that do a combination of things.

To you experiened radio advertisers out there, which do you recommend? Is 30 seconds enough to get your message across or is 60 seconds better because you have time to be more descriptive and plug your website enough times? I would love to hear what everyone things and what has worked for them....

Thank you,
Darkangel

[Tater]

I would say try do to a 30 second one and if it comes acrossed to rushed and like your throwing alot of info at them in the 30 seconds then do a 60. But have everything thing typed out that you wanna say and time yourself so you can go in and get it done.

[imax]

Sadly, our 15 second spots seem to draw more attention than our 60's... Actually, not sadly, that's awesome. We have a lot of success with 15's, and they are less expensive, and you can saturate an hour with them pretty easily.

-- I

[damon carson]

Weve done 60, unless you can afford to run it countless times do a longer one.
Damon

[Darkangel]

So with 15's are you pretty much only mentioning your website?

Thanks everyone,
Darkangel

[imax]

You'd be suprised what you can do in 15 seconds. Here's one of our insanely popular spots from last year:

http://ian.sitenation.com/radio/FF07_KRNA_15.mp3

There's a few buffer seconds at the beginning and end, so we could have done even more, but this flows quite well. Why add paint to a masterpeice?

-- I

[Bill Schnell]

lol, good ad, very memorable

[Dark Lord]

As a longtime writer, producer, and voice-talent for haunt-advertisers, for me it all comes down to "What story are you telling?" The :15 station-produced commercial is good as a promo for the STATION's involvement with your haunt, but does it tell the story of the haunt itself? "Come look at our nuts." Yeah. Right.

How do you know that you got more response from the :15's than the :60's? Did the station tell you, or did your customers tell you? Or is it possible that the :15's reinforced the story you laid out in the :60?

Bottom line is this: All your advertising--TV, Radio, YouTube, everything--MUST lead your customer to the point of sale, which is hopefully your website. The best way to get them there is to get them involved with a story they want to know more about.

No one listens to the radio (or watches TV) for commercials. They listen and watch for what interests them...and SOMETIMES, it's a commercial. Do the work right, and it'll be yours.

You can hear what I do at www.VoiceFromHell.com.

[imax]

We used a variety of metrics to determine what was most effective. Each ad of same length was identical, except the last few seconds when we sent them to the stations site. We did this, because we wanted to see how well each of the stations preformed for us (we don't trust what the stations tell us, and needed a way to track it). We actually learned a great deal by doing this. Once on the station's site, they could click through to ours on via a unique non-guessable URL to deter any funny business.

Ad effectiveness could be tracked via a few methods, including access time of our site based on the schedule of when our ads ran. While not perfect (eg, can't track the 'delayed' responses very well), the 15 second spots outperformed the 60's significantly. Round robin the ads over a variety of days and weeks to eliminate any specific hour or day peaks.

We also had great feedback from our customers via several means, not only at the haunt but via email and phone messages.

So, in our case, 15's are highly effective. May not be true everywhere, but it is here. And, we have not abandoned 60's, but we purchase more 15's because they are more cost effective and seem to preform much better, at least in our metrics.

I want to stress this point: YOU MUST do the legwork to see what works for YOUR ATTRACTION. You can listen to me with my 15's, or someone else proclaim 60's work better for them, and we are likely BOTH right. It depends on your market! It might take you a few years to figure out exactly what works well, when you spend too much or too little, or even if radio/tv/print is good for you. What you should NEVER do is blindly place your faith in the people selling you this. While they may have good intentions, they still have the underlying motive of getting as much money out of you as possible, which may not be the right thing. Use your head. Track your preformance. Trust noone without hard numbers. Radio (and especially TV) are extremely difficult to track, but dream up a way. Good luck!

-- I

(as a side note, I don't see radio remaining as a viable advertising route in the long run in our business. The effectiveness has rapidly been declining in recent years, and it will soon reach the point of being just a waste of money for us. Until then, we will continue using it, be we will be keeping a very close eye on it...)

[Darkangel]

Very interesting points Imax and Dark Lord. You both seem to know what you are talking about. Dark Lord, since you do haunt ads what do you find most people get from you as far as length of ads?

DARKANGEL