A successful creative messages for radio gets a consumer to buy a product or service. This product or service can be a necessity, such as auto insurance, or an indulgence, like the new triple cheeseburger at the local fast food restaurant. Either way, the ad must motivate and ultimately lead to action by the consumer. To write a radio ad that achieves this, you need to ensure that you overcome the lack of visual elements and capture your audience's attention with words and sound.

i).Production value and voiceover talent.

Contrary to popular belief, these are not the most important element in great ads. Yet they are what clients often use to determine whether they "like" an ad. From the data we've collected through ten years of testing radio ads we've found that there is very often an inverse relationship between production value and ad performance. Yes, that's counterintuitive. Production value shouldn't "hurt" response, right? There are a number of possibilities for why this is true. Maybe good production value distracts ad developers from the right amount of focus on great copywriting. Or, perhaps good production value creates an ad that is so "slick" that it doesn't stand out. As Seth Godin puts it "perfect is boring".

Nonetheless, production and voice are still important. Production must enhance believability, catch attention, and ensure the message can be ingested by the audience with minimal effort. And the voice talent's read must be evaluated for it's non-verbal communication, not just what the words mean as they're strung together.

ii. Distinctiveness of the offering.

The greater the "me too" factor, the lower the potential for the campaign. If your product is another of the hundreds of weight loss products or diets, then you're likely going to have a difficult time coming up with something new to say to people. Distinctiveness applies not just to the product benefits, but also to the creative approach, the offer, and any other element of the campaign.

iii. Effective use of the interplay between emotion and logic.

There are points in the ad where emotional appeals are appropriate, and there are other points in the ad where logical appeals are potent. Few people make a purchase decision based solely on one or the other. Quite often we're "reeled in" with emotion, and just before we buy we look for a logical reason to rationalize our emotional decision. Successful radio ads recognize this dynamic and flow accordingly.

iv. Articulation.

There are a number of different ways to express your message. Any one can get the message across. But only one is the optimum formula that presents the combination to the lock on the door of your customers' minds. Changing just one word or a few words in an ad can have an amazingly large impact on results. We've seen this over and over again - some key insight that produces a small copy change that dramatically boosts results. Or the opposite. Articulation matters. One of the biggest mistakes we've seen is using wishy-washy, non-specific language. Saying something "Product A is designed to do X" is not as strong as saying "Product