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Spare the Blue Pencil to Spoil the Sales Message Writes Puhlicity Director Milt Hill of WHK-WCLE, Cleveland, 0.
ALONG with the material I scarcities, priorities, and increased taxes, the man who foots the bill in radio, our friend the sponsor, is facing a public which is becoming increasingly interested in, and at the same time critical of, radio.
Educators are studying ways to improve it, malcontents are bringing pressure to regulate it, listeners are becoming less apathetic and more insistent about what they like and dislike on the air. The number of radio stations has jumped, their power has increased, and the radio business is booming, but still the clamor goes on. Why?
Obviously there is no single answer and no panacea. But there is one thing that commercial radio and the advertising industry could well undertake to substantially reduce the number of radio's severest critics, and in consequence do a much better selling job. The widespread application of a commercial writer's guide would raise the general level of commercial radio copy,
overcome many public objections, and make copy more effective. Newspaper writers have style books. It is high time radio writers have some sort of guide, too. Let's look into the following set of rules, and see whether they might form the basis for such a guide.
First of all, and this is fundamental, don't hit your listeners over the head with a baseball bat by warning them that a commercial is coming. There's a subtle, cleverer way, widely used, but still more widely ignored. Instead of saying ''You've heard the news, now here's news from our sponsor/' say nothing by way of introduction to the commercial. Why warn the listener to turn off his mind or the radio? Go right into your commercial right after your news while the listeners can still be placed in that category. Then they'll hear what the sponsor has to say. The same goes for any type program, music, news, drama, or what have you. The most you have to do is insert a briefpause or fade-out.
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