Nicola Gilbert on Radio's Gold

European Festival of Creativity, Eurobest, took place in Helsinki last week and although a slew of awards were handed out at the event’s closing night ceremony, no Grand Prix or gold prizes were given in the Radio category.

The news came as a disappointment for Nicola Gilbert, deputy managing director at Grand Central Recording Studios. Having worked in the medium for years she maintains that the traditional channel still has a lot to give in a world of tech firsts and believes that we shouldn't be writing anything off just yet.

Below, Gilbert channels her thoughts into an opinion piece about the craft of radio advertising, the level of talent it takes to deliver top content and champions a bright future for the format.

Writing for radio is an art and a craft. Creating pictures with words is a job for writers with real talent and an idea, a great idea. Radio deserves respect both for the skill necessary and the effectiveness of it.

With that in mind, it’s hard not to be disappointed with the lack of good radio creative this year. At Eurobest last week, there was no radio considered worthy of a Grand Prix or gold by the jury, and that’s with the very best from the whole of the Continent to choose from.

Setting standards

You may argue that awards aren’t the client’s priority. However, winning awards is about setting standards and championing the best of the best. That matters.

I listen to a lot of radio, and I am finding it hard to recall a good commercial, let alone a great one. I posed this question to another radio specialist yesterday, and he was of the same opinion.

The UK was once one of the best when it came to writing commercials for radio, maybe not at the level of the US but we definitely had something to be proud of. Be it from a glass office at a leading agency, or a humble desk at a radio production company in Soho, we made the ad breaks on commercial radio more of an event.

I remember hearing Hamlet’s Bummer for the first time and roaring with laughter. Produced by CDP in 2000, it’s the stuff of genius.

There have been many successful radio campaigns, where good creative and outstanding production values have delivered incredibly satisfying results for clients.

The Toyota Avensis campaign that I produced in 2003 exceeded all expectations. Talk and Absolute were receiving hundreds of calls an hour from people requesting to hear the commercial again. One station even held a phone-in with members of the public impersonating the ad. The client at Toyota thought all his Christmases’ had come at once.

So what went wrong? It takes a group of skilled craftspeople to create good radio. You need excellent writers, experienced sound designers, well-cast talent and focussed direction to pull it all together. I fear that the appropriate budgets are not being allocated to allow for all of this, so clients’ messages are not being written and delivered in the most effective way.

It’s a difficult market that brand managers exist in now; they have to stretch their marketing budgets across so many mediums. They are under a lot of pressure to deliver the best value in everything they do. So you could argue that value has become more important than creative to some brands.

In my humble opinion, we have an outstanding roster of specialists in the UK advertising and production industry. Other markets drool over what the UK has to offer, in terms of talent and resources.

However, there are too many companies diluting their services in order to retain business. This must be confusing for brands as in some cases it can appear at a glance that everyone is offering exactly the same thing. The ‘jack of all trades’ approach just muddies the waters and doesn’t deliver the best results and overall value.

Fixing the future

And how do we fix the problem? Our industry should support the varying talent and expertise that each specialist company has. We should all complement each other, rather than trying to be each other.

Creative agencies do have world-class copywriters, media agencies are superb at finding the right strategy and medium to deliver the message, the commercial radio market is growing and continues to deliver exceptional programming, and specialist audio facilities continue to develop and train outstanding sound designers who can help an agency and brand create audio ‘art’.

Let’s get the audience excited about radio creative and deliver a sales message with a laugh-out-loud or thought-provoking script once more. What better way of acknowledging this than with some well-deserved gold coming back to the UK in 2015.