Radio Commercials

Keeney Bros. Music Centers

Dreaming (2004 Radio Mercury Award Winner)

First Drums

Chris Clark, Realtor­®

Before You List Your Home

Things Change

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.