It’s almost too easy… picking radio commercials, that is.

Commercials are the soul of radio. Without them, the radio goes out of business, because they provide most of the operating dollars for the radio. If radio stations pay close attention to the quality of the commercials on their airwaves, they end up with listeners who listen longer because bad commercials don’t force them to change stations. Good radio programmers and consultants have known this for a long time, and great consultants encourage their clients to pay attention to the quality of the ads they broadcast. One radio guru, Dan O’Day, is a leading advocate of recognizing bad commercials and replacing them with better ones.

If you search the internet for the dan o’day bad radio commercial generator, you’ll find a toy that Dan created to demonstrate how easy it is to fall for the clichés that surround bad radio commercials. You should go and play with him if you have a little time to kill and feel like laughing. Although if your business uses radio and you don’t have a great copywriter, the Bad Radio Commercial generator might bring you to tears. Often the results sound suspiciously like the stuff on the radio everywhere.

Commercials are a reality on radio and television broadcasts, as this is how the stations earn all the money they use to operate the station, pay the staff, and keep the lights on. But since many of the commercials that air are local buys, sold directly by a station vendor, the station has final say in how the local ads sound.

It’s not hard to understand why they would intentionally pollute their airwaves with lame excuses for writing and producing. It’s really easy to write a really bad radio commercial, but it’s not too hard to write a good one. Radio managers just need to work a little harder on their local ads to reap big payoffs in audience.

A great example of a bad local business is often the local high volume car dealership. Somehow, at some point in history, every car dealership must have gotten together and agreed to yell at their target audience.

Do you like being yelled at? Most of us don’t. I wonder why car dealers think they have to yell to get our attention. And I wonder why they think we’ll respond positively to all that yelling.

Delving into that bad car commercial, you’ll probably hear a line like, “We’re Mr. Big Volume, and we’ll be number one soon!” Why do we care? I don’t care if he’s #1 or #10…he hasn’t told me what he’s going to do for me.

Deeper still, you might hear something like, “We’ll do whatever it takes to get your business.” Again, why do we care? And the crafty part of me might be thinking… “whatever it takes? What can I do to call that bluff?” Because we know “whatever it takes” isn’t true, so now Mr. Big Volume has yelled at me, lied to me, and told me what I can do for him.

There’s still no reason for me to go see him, right? And he looks at all the money he’s spent to make me completely disinterested in buying him a car.

When you think about the time and effort the station put into producing a shoddy product for their customer, you quickly realize that no one got their money’s worth there, including the station. Sure, they got the client’s money to buy the show, but bad places scare off listeners, and if the client doesn’t get a good reward for buying the ad, they don’t come back either. Lose-lose-lose. Not intelligent.

On second thought, the commercial could be very different. Ditch the old school car ad style and embrace a new paradigm. Communicate with your client with a compelling, common sense message about why that client should consider trading with you. Make the focus the benefit for the customer, not the dealer. Make the message clear and for God’s sake make it one message, not four or five. If the commercial is going to be a 60-second ad, only write 45-50 seconds of copy, so the announcer can have a chance to build a real bond with your customer.

There are many more ways to make a good ad great, but for now, radio creatives may want to focus on how to make their bad ad good.

That should keep them busy for a while!