Radio Commercials

Keeney Bros. Music Centers

Dreaming (2004 Radio Mercury Award Winner)

First Drums

Chris Clark, Realtor­®

Before You List Your Home

Things Change

Chud Wendle, Realtor®

I started working with Chud Wendle in 2010. Chud had been running his family’s highly successful automobile dealerships in Spokane for years. After cashing out of the family car business and developing a popular strip mall where the main dealership had once stood, he and his young family moved to our community (Pullman, Washington), where he launched into a new career as a Realtor. Without going into the back story in detail, I started following his Facebook and blog posts and eventually had a chance to meet with him over coffee.  I told him that I’d often wondered whether a person just starting out in real estate could shave many years off the time it would normally take to become well-known and established in a local market, through a smart, consistent radio advertising campaign.  I said that I had a particular idea in mind, but I didn’t want to share it unless he agreed up front that, if he liked the idea, he would either run it on my stations, or else not use it in any form whatsoever.  He agreed.  So, I suggested that we brand him as “Pullman’s Real Estate Expert” and have him voice an ongoing series of Real Estate tips. He was a great fit for this campaign, audacious as it sounded to have the new guy position himself this way.  I cautioned him that if he started doing this, two things would happen:  1) he would incur the wrath of most of the real estate agents in town (which happened); and 2) every media salesperson in the market would be after him for a piece of this (which also happened).  And I advised him, based on his budget, to limit his advertising to just one or two stations, so as not to sacrifice frequency for reach. He agreed.

After 3-4 months, he was seeing the fruit of this effort as he leap-frogged over 95% of the other agents in the market, both in terms of prominence and sales, or fame and fortune, if you prefer. Anecdotes and success stories were plentiful, including one rather embarrassing situation where a lady who’d been working with another agent in the same office came in and rather loudly announced that she wanted to start working with Chud instead.  Many of the people who contacted him for representation in a real estate transaction cited his radio advertising as the reason they’d sought him out.

The spots ran every day, every week, all year long. We changed ad copy every few weeks and covered a wide variety of topics of interest to home sellers, buyers, and investors. Chud was not afraid to tackle touchy subjects, including FSBO’s.  At my suggestion, he created a special area on his website devoted to helping people who wanted to sell their own homes.  The logic, of course, was that most people who start out trying to sell their homes eventually bag it and go with a Realtor.  We wanted that Realtor to be Chud.

His campaign ran successfully for 3 years or so, until he decided to move with his family back to Spokane to take advantage of new opportunities.  

Here are a few of the forty-some commercials I produced with Chud.

Jordan Vorderbrueggen, Realtor®

After running some radio ads in support of a Pullman Regional Hospital Foundation fundraiser, Homes for Health, Jordan contacted me about creating a branding campaign for himself. After some consideration and discussion with Jordan, I thought that the best way to make him locally famous quicklyùand to get people to his website—would be to have some fun with his last name. Here’s how we did that.

We kept this one in rotation consistently while adding messages on specific topics relevant to our unique university market.

Today, Jordan is a successful Realtor with the Woodbridge Real Estate group, serving a growing number of clients throughout the Palouse.

Clearview Eye Clinic

Too many testimonial advertisements come across as contrived, even hokey. Because it’s not enough for the testimonial to be truthful; it must be believable. I was hired by Dr. David Leach of Clearview Eye Clinic to help them tell actual patient stories in a way that would engage and resonate with listeners. Here are some of those stories, one-minute spots culled from lengthy conversations with the patients and Dr. Leach.

The National Lentil Festival

For more than two decades, I’ve written and produced the radio commercials for this quirky annual event held each August in Pullman, Washington. Here are a few samples, including the only singing spot I’ve ever done—as the festival’s mascot, Tase T. Lentil.

Jingles

The spoken word is uniquely powerful. After all, speech is our primary form of communication; print is an imitation of speech. A picture isn’t worth a thousand words, as Trout and Ries documented in The eye vs. the ear, published in the March 14, 1983 issue of Advertising Age. (Indeed, the subhead proclaimed: It may be that a word is worth a thousand pictures.) As the late Tony Schwartz famously observed, “God’s gift to radio is that humans are born without ear lids.”

Jingles take the spoken word to a new level of intrusiveness and memorability. Think of all the tunes that make up the soundtrack of your life. Chances are you can recall thousands of them, never having made an effort to commit them to memory. That’s the power of music.

As kids, we learned the alphabet by singing it to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star. McDonald’s got us to memorize what’s in a Big Mac by singing about it. Those of us who grew up in the ’60s can still recall cigarette commercials because of their musical branding—”Winston tastes good like a (clap, clap) cigarette should.” “You get a lot to like with a Marlboro, filter, flavor, pack or box.” “To a smoker, it’s a Kent.”—even though no cigarette ad has aired on radio or television since 1970; these ads were so effective, Congress banned them from the public airwaves.

Jingles remain an effective way to anchor a brand or business in the mind of the consumer. Of the dozens of jingles I’ve helped to create for local clients, this one gets the prize for longevity. Myers Auto Rebuild has been airing this 30-second full-sing jingle, at least 100 times a month on local radio stations, for nearly three decades—and you should hear the stories they tell about it!

Myers Auto Rebuild

Local Jingles Montage

Sam Dial Jewelers

Not your typical jewelry store, not your typical jeweler – and therefore, not your typical jewelry store commercials. After creating his signature tagline (“You’re gonna love what happens next.”), we built Sam’s ongoing campaign around message voiced primarily by him and occasionally his co-workers, including daughter Morgan.

This was Sam’s first commercial in the new campaign, which first aired in 2013.

Another early spot, intended to convey the desirability of colored gemstones as gifts, was built around Sam’s first gemstone purchase. The word flag—”stop by and I’ll show it to you”—caused many visitors to the store to ask to see Sam’s pink topaz.

The first time Sam’s co-workers got involved in a spot, partly scripted and partly ad-libbed, they made it fun.

Prior to kicking off Sam’s Christmas season campaign, we would record a special thank-you to the community from Sam, which ran exclusively during Thanksgiving week.

Sam’s holiday ads were all about making shopping for jewelry sound like fun.

W.I.S.H. Medical

The acronym stands for Wholly Integrated Sexual Health. It’s a local clinic, under the auspices of a Christian Crisis Pregnancy Center that provides pregnancy testing (including medical ultrasounds), STI testing, and reproductive health exams. The center’s director asked me to help create a campaign to reach high schoolers and their parents, both to educate and engage them about sexual health issues and to remember this resource should the need arise.

Dr. Alyssa Hoehn (Moscow Family Eye Care and Pullman Family Eye Care)

Dr. Hoehn, an eye surgeon with an established practice in Moscow, Idaho, purchased the optometric practice of Dr. Dan David of Family Eye Clinic in Pullman, whom I had the privilege and pleasure of serving for more than 30 years, and with whom my wife and I became good friends. As Dr. David had been a regular radio advertiser for many years, it was only natural to use radio to announce the 2019 change of ownership.

Dr. Hoehn recognized the value of all the goodwill Dr. David had earned through his daily radio advertising over the decades and wisely chose to build upon it by continuing to talke to listeners every day. As an eye surgeon, she wanted to call attention to the new services that would be available from her practice, particularly cataract surgeries and LASIK procedures. Her charming personality and infectious enthusiasm immediately connected with listeners as she spoke to them about their eye care.

In 2022, Dr. Hoehn welcomed a new eye surgeon to her growing practice. As it happened, the new surgeon, Dr. Heidi Eisman, was a former classmate and longtime friend of Dr. Hoehn. Their back story furnished a natural and engaging introduction of the new provider.

As her practice has continued to grow, additional optometrists have also joined the practice. Following the hiring of two new optometrists, Drs. Hoehn and Eisman took to the airwaves to share the good news—that now patients would be seeing better sooner.

Patient stories can be uniquely compelling, and Dr. Hoehn occasionally shares some of these in her radio ads.