Jerry Lee

Reach is all well and good in terms of radio offering the largest audience to advertisers, but that doesn't mean much if you can't "seal the deal" in terms of crafting and airing engaging commercials that fuels the advertisers' business. And that's where Jerry Lee comes in. The WBEB/Philadelphia Chairman is offering radio groups and stations the opportunity to create engaging commercials that will not only improve the economics of the participating stations, but of the radio medium as a whole. Here's how it works:

Why are you interested in "engaging commercial" research?

My current mission in life is to get every advertiser who spends $12,000 or more a year in radio to be using commercials that engage the listener. Why? An Advertising Research Foundation study of 5,000 ad campaigns found that 75% of the success of an ad campaign is due to how good the creative is. An engaging commercial produces eight times the sales as compared to non-engaging commercials. (2007 study by OMD)

The single most important thing that radio can do is to focus on creating engaging commercials. That is where the money is. Everything else pales in comparison to how engaging the radio commercial is.

How does one ascertain or judge just what an "engaging commercial" is?

Sensory Logic is the premier company in the world that uses facial coding to ascertain whether a commercial is engaging or not. Facial coding captures facial expressions and dissects them at one-thirtieth of a second to measure whether the commercial is engaging. It's very scientific, and the research has proven to be 90% accurate - no other form of commercial research is close to that accuracy. There is one problem: It's too expensive for radio. They charge $6,000 for a 60-second spot and $5,000 for a 30-second spot.

I approached Dan Hill, the founder of Sensory Logic, and said, "You have a great product, but we can't afford it in radio. You and your staff have been doing this for many years; couldn't you just look or listen to a commercial and be almost as accurate as Facial Coding?" He said he would be 75%-80% accurate, vs. 90% for Facial Coding. Sensory Logic's staff can now do reviews of radio commercials based on the principles that it has developed through Facial Coding and at the same time, dramatically lower the cost of providing feedback to copywriters. They have lowered the cost to a point where the cost is now a non-issue.

Just how big an issue is the lack of "engaging commercials?"

Look at it this way: According to Sensory Logic, 20% of National radio commercials are engaging, while only 8% of Local radio commercials are engaging. Think about the upside Local radio has. If we go from having 8% of Local radio commercials being engaging to, say, 60%, we won't be able to get out of the way of the money.

How many WBEB advertisers have already signed onto this - and has everyone been satisfied with its effectiveness?

We have just recently started to offer this feedback service from Sensory Logic for free. We used to charge for it, and it was a tough sell. In April, we took one of our AEs and started to offer this service for free to his clients. As the result of him getting 20 clients, we determined that we had a service that the agencies and clients really valued.

As of this past week, we are now opening this up to all the AEs at the station. We've never had a negative response. To get this service, you must spend a half-hour to go through a Sensory Logic webinar called "WriteToEngage.com." When you go through it, you learn the 18 key principles of writing an engaging commercial and you now have a common language with Sensory Logic, when they give the in-depth feedback on the commercial. Agencies and their clients love it.

Does it work for all kinds of radio commercials, from homemade auto dealership spots to live reads?

Yes and no. Allow me to explain: Any advertiser is wasting their money if they start with price.

Even Walmart cannot start with price. You must establish value before you talk about price.

Another key problem in radio ads: 75% of single voice commercials are a waste of money. We will ask the car dealer to have their copywriter go through WriteToEngage.com and submit a revised script that doesn't start with price or have a single voice. Within one to two rewrites they will have an engaging commercial. As to live reads, we strongly discourage them. Most of them are a waste of money.

After a radio station starts using Sensory Logic to analyze its commercials, are you concerned that management may drop the relationship and do it on their own?

No; if you just go through that webinar, but not use Sensory Logics' feedback, you might increase the effectiveness of the commercial a bit, but nothing like you'd get from taking advantage of their in-depth feedback. And the cost for feedback for freshening up commercials runs between $25 and $50, depending on the size of the clients spending.

How do you account for the disparity between the effectiveness of national spots (20%) and local spots (8%)?

More high-priced copywriters work on National commercials than Local commercials - and even then, the National commercial copywriters only get it right 20% of the time.

Can local copywriters become successful copywriters simply by checking out writetoengage.com?

No. It's the combination of the webinar and the feedback system that is the secret sauce to producing engaging commercials. We have never found an agency that can't produce an engaging commercial in one to two rewrites, but we have found that about one-third of copywriters at radio stations just don't have the ability to write engaging commercials. We have a simple test to determine if your station copywriter has the ability to create engaging commercials. If it takes them three rewrites and the commercial is still not engaging, they just don't have the talent.

When you send a commercial to Sensory Logic for review, how long does it take for you to get feedback? And how long does it take before you can gauge if the commercial is actually successful, revenue-wise?

You get feedback from Sensory Logic in 24 hours. And regarding the time it takes to measure the commercial's success, it depends on the advertising category. If it's a restaurant commercial, we usually know within a week. But if it's for a car dealer, we may not know it for 20 weeks or more. That's because radio is all about building a brand. Radio -- and TV -- are the main two advertising mediums that create a desire for a product. Now for purchasing a car, a very small percentage of the population is in the market to buy a car at any given moment. But once they are in the market for a car, all of a sudden your brand -- if it's been consistently advertising on radio -- jumps off the page and stands out over everybody else.

Radio now has an opportunity it has never had in its history, thanks to social media. Most people these days, when they want to make a purchase, they go on the web to check out reviews and find out about that product. Then they go to the store to buy it. Guess what: When they see your brand on the web, all of a sudden your name jumps off the page because they're familiar with you, after hearing your ads on the radio - especially if they're engaging commercials.

In the past, only two mediums helped radio that way. One was the Yellow Pages; the other was the local paper. When a client ran an ad in the local paper, that ad came to life because people - who heard that client on the radio -- subconsciously saw a much bigger version of that retailer's ad. The same thing happened with the Yellow Pages. People would connect that ad in the Yellow

Pages to the client with the radio commercial they heard. But this works far better if you're running an engaging radio commercial.

You said earlier that cost to do this is negligible. How can that be?

I have an exclusive partnership with Sensory Logic that allows me to offer their feedback on radio commercials that is so inexpensive that money is almost a non-issue.

For example, let's say you have a client that can only afford to spend $12,000 a year in radio.

It will cost $650 to provide free feedback for a typical advertiser in year one and $100 for the second year.

Advertisers who spend more than $50,000 a year it will typically cost $1,425 the first year and

$200 each year after that.

In addition, I charge a success fee of 5% on your net increase in revenue that is over and above the most dollars that you received in the last three years from that advertiser. (Example: Year 1, the client spent $15,000, Year 2, $25,000 and Year 3, $20,000. Year 2, $25,000 would be your base year). The 5% is based on the honor system and is payable 90 days after the end of each year. If you decide to stop using the services of Sensory Logic, the 5% is no longer payable.

Why do you base these deals on an honor system?

I do not want you to pay me the 5% success fee if you feel you would have gotten the increase in revenue without the help of engaging commercials. That's why it is based on the honor system. I want you to look at what I am offering as being money you would never have gotten if you did business as usual. If you don't make money from the Sensory Logic commercial reviews, you don't pay me any money.

How do interested parties apply for this arrangement?

On November 1st, we will start syndicating this service across the country, giving an exclusive to one radio group per market, with one exception -- Sensory Logic will supply its services for any commercial that is created in-house for any competitor in the market. That's because our mission is to get every advertiser who spends $12,000 or more a year in radio to be running an engaging commercial. The benefits of being the Radio Group that offers the free testing and feedback in your market are:

1. You will be the first stations bought.
2. You will get a bigger share of the budget. In our society, if I do a favor for you, it is in our culture to return the favor.
3. You will be in a position to nudge your rates up over a period of time, since this valuable free service is unavailable from anyone else in the market.
4. Once clients are making more money, thanks to engaging commercials, they will increase their spending on radio. Your competitors will increase their revenues thanks to your Group's efforts, but your Group will gain much, much more.
5. Sensory Logic will also show you how to take money out of TV.

You can contact me at JerryL@101-fm.com to get the exclusive for your market.

How long do these deals run?

We do not ask anyone to sign a contract. We give them a Letter of Understanding that is

cancellable after 120 days by either party.

You mentioned earlier that a third of all copywriters at radio stations simply have no talent. Is there a shortage of good copywriters?

No, it's not that. Many stations will ask their AE with no training, to write a commercial and expect it to be engaging. That just doesn't work.

Ideally, how do you see this panning out?

Today, in a typical radio market, radio has about a 35% advertiser churn rate; 35% of the clients don't come back the next year. We can eliminate much of that churn if the advertisers on radio stations have engaging commercials. The reason they don't come back, by and large, is that they don't see any effect from their radio advertising. When they see the effect of engaging commercials, they will never leave.