"The Broadcast Age began about 75 years ago when KDKA, America's first commercial radio station signed on in Pittsburgh, PA.," says Rick Ducey, Senior V.P. for Research at the National Association of Broadcasters. "This created a whole new experience for the audience which began relating to people on radio as trusted friends," he observes.
According to the Radio Advertising Bureau, Americans spend 22 percent of their time listening to the radio, listenening from 14 hours to over 21 hours every week, depending upon their age. Its portability, coupled with its ability to segment listeners by their program tastes, has contributed to its long standing popularity.
There are nearly 13,000 AM and FM radio stations in the U.S., with about two-thirds of the non-duplicating stations (where AM and FM do not use the same programming) regularly using public service announcements. However, before mailing PSAs to stations, there are a variety of details you should consider when preparing your campaign plan. Some of these include:
- Establishing a budget for getting your radio PSA package produced, designed, replicated and mailed.
- Deciding how you intend to produce your PSAs - whether you will hire an independent producer, having them produced by your advertising agency, or producing them internally.
- Selecting an experienced radio PSA distributor. They should present a plan to target stations that reach your primary and secondary target audiences; show samples of packaging that will attract the attention of public service directors; develop a timeline for getting various packaging elements designed, printed and mailed and discuss how they intend to evaluate campaign impact.
Establishing a Budget/Selecting Material Formats
Your radio budget will depend largely upon who your producer is, the talent you use (famous names obviously cost more unless you can get them to do it pro-bono), and whether you use orignial or library music. However, there are a few guidelines you can use to determine how much money you need to allocate for a professionally executed radio PSA campaign.
"Your radio production must be even better and more creative than television, because you don't have visual images, you have to create them with words and sound effects."
"Since radio is not a visual medium, it is important to put a lot of thought into the creative message, " points out Roger Vilsack, an award-winning producer with more than 25 years experience in the medium. "Your radio production must be even better and more creative than television, even though you will spend a lot more on TV production. Because you don't have visual images, you have to create them with words and sound effects," Vilsack says.
While a lift of TV sometimes works, "a good TV spot shouldn't work in radio," Vilsack points out, although upon occasion a TV lift can be used for radio. He also advises to get the very best talent possible for your radio production "because your radio spot is going to depend upon people who don't just read the copy but who can act it out." Vilsack advises selecting talent from the major markets, especially New York, where there is a big pool of trained talent available.
Vilsack recommends budgeting from $4,500-$20,000 for the radio production, depending upon the number of voices, music, and sound effects. Creative fees for direction, script writing and talent selection will cost another $2,500 - $5,000.
Format/Length Flexibility
One of the most frequently asked questions regarding radio PSAs pertains to the lengths that should be produced. As with all PSA material, the more flexibility you can offer the media, the greater chance of getting your PSAs aired. Try to offer at least three different lengths -:15,:30 and:60 and make sure you provide both recorded and live copy for those stations that will only use one or the other message formats. Also think about producing messages for different audiences, i.e. Country & Western, Middle-of-the-Road African-American and Spanish. The more that your radio PSAs match the program format of the station, the better chance they will be used.
The next decision you need to make is the type of radio packaging you want to use to send materials to stations. There is no strong evidence to suggest that one packaging concept performs better than others and it would be very difficult to measure station usage based on package design alone. There are many factors that influence the media's decision to use a particular PSA that have nothing to do with package design, such as time of year, nature of the message, availability of time, and the number of stations to which PSAs were distributed. To a large degree the choice of radio package design is based on internal considerations (maintaining your brand image) and most importantly, your budget.
CDs have become the standard for music and radio programming, but there are a wide variety of different packaging concepts that can make a big difference in the amount you budget for radio distribution. To minimize postal costs, we recommend packages that conform to the Postal Service's automated handling equipment.
The package we typically use is called a FlexMailer. It has a four-color printed cover and measures folded 5x7". Inside, the letter to public service director goes on the left panel (if using a vertical design) and there is a slot on the right panel to hold the CD, the evaluation response card and any other collateral literature. Your distributor should be able to provide design templates for all elements and the specifications for the CD label which are particularly exacting.
There are also some guidelines to follow when producing the CD and packaging which were provided by Bruce Dowdy, who has extensive radio operations experience.
- Send both CD-audio files as well as Enhanced CDs. These include the CD-Audio tracks along with CD-ROM/MP3 files for those stations which would prefer to use this computer-friendly format. That way, it's easy for any station to play your PSAs, and if you don't make it easy, they won't bother.
- When dealing with union talent, get an unlimited usage buyout so no matter when the PSAs air, you are protected. Or, alternatively, put a kill date on all your radio PSA packaging that tells stations when your PSAs should be pulled. By doing that, you have done your due diligence in terms of adhering to union regulations.
- Provide both "as recorded" and live announcer copy to stations. The first will help stations match your PSAs to their audience; the second will be useful if the station does not use recorded PSAs.
- Provide written descriptions of the spots which are helpful when stations quickly scan your materials to determine the best "fit" for the station's demographics. Also include as recorded scripts and live copy for those stations which may not use recorded PSAs.
- When you create MP3 files, try to give them helpful, descriptive file names - such as: OurOrg_5kWalk_Country_30.MP3 Use a sampling frequency of 44.1kHz with a bit rate of at least 128 kb/sec, or stations may find the quality unacceptable. 192 or 390 kb/sec is even better - especially if your message contains music.
Another technique for getting your messages on the air is to provide "donut" messages, where part of the announcement is prerecorded, and part is left open for the local station to customize with their own on-air talent, or insert paid messages from a sponsor.
Tips to Reduce Costs
Since you can place up to an hour's worth of programming on a CD, you should try to use as much of the capacity as possible. Following are some tips to think about:
Put all different types of PSAs on a single CD, even though they are aimed at different audiences. Your distributor can tell you what radio formats are most popular, but generally they include those shown here. You may want to do separate separate PSAs for Spanish and African-American audiences, since they are very distinctly different. If you do Spanish PSAs, it is not necessary to do a separate Spanish package, but make sure you use a translator who speaks mainstream Spanish, and use Spanish titles and photography on your packaging.
Another idea is to put two to five minute audio pieces - often referred to as ANRs (Audio News Releases) on the CD. You are going to pay the same amount of money to produce and distribute the package, so the more value you can create from it, the better it will serve your interests.
You can also distribute PSA materials for another type of media on the CD such as print PSAs. They both are distributed on CDs and all you need to do is put the creative files in separate folders and label them appropriately. This will cut your distribution in half versus doing separate mailings.
If you are really on a tight budget, another way to reduce costs is to consider using a "shared-disk" distribution service. We call ours Radio DiskPAK and by ganging up several different client PSAs on a single disk we can reduce costs by more than half.
Materials To Supply
Irregardless of the packaging concept, there are several different things you need to provide your distributor. First, if you are providing camera ready artwork then you need to provide art for all collateral pieces on a disk with all native files including fonts, art and a printout of the artwork. You should check with your distributor to see what types of art files are acceptable by the vendor doing the packaging and replication. If your distributor is producing the artwork, you will need to provide:
- Copy for letter to public service director on your organization's letterhead
- Logo with color breaks and PMS colors for logo
- Signature of person signing letter in black ink (felt tip pen preferred)
- Copy for live announcer scripts, as recorded scripts, and facts on client issue or organization (preferably a Word document file)
The Distribution Plan
Unlike television, which is a general interest medium, radio programming is aimed at listeners with particular interests, making it easy to segment stations by ethnicity, age, educational level and lifestyle. The list below includes the major radio program formats and the approximate number of stations in each format:
FORMAT COUNTS AUDIENCE
Adult Contemporary 2,205 Teens to 40's
African-American/Urban 458 Afro-American youth
Beautiful Music/Big Band 332 Mid-age to-elderly
Classical 288 Mid-age to-elderly
Country/Western 3,346 All ages/lifestyles/skews rural
Educational 1,238 Youth 18-25
Middle-of-the-road 1,105 All ages/lifestyles
Oldies 784 Mid-age 30-50's
News/Talk 908 Mid-age to-elderly
Religio 974 All ages; Gospel skews Black
Rock/Album Rock 1,208 Youth 18-25
Spanish 567 Hispanic-all ages
Top 40 324 Mid-age 30-50's
The number of stations you should target is influenced by a number of factors, including your target audience, budget, demographic considerations and previous usage practices of the station. Our typical distribution plan is 3,500 stations, but the effective reach of this plan is over 5,000 because there are more than 1,500 stations that are multiple owners, and they only want to get one PSA which they will share with their sister stations. These stations are all previous PSA users and provides coverage across markets and program formats.
Given a limited budget, you must make some hard choices in terms of what stations to target and why. After budget, we believe the next important factor to consider are the stations that regularly use PSAs. We maintain something called the Previous User Index (PUI) for every radio station in our database, which is very useful when targeting subsets of the total radio universe.
Another factor to consider in developing the distribution plan is to include those stations that may be important to your local community partners. Stations, for example, that support local non-profit charity events, those that have done live remotes for a special occasion, or those that have provided news coverage should all be targeted.
Localizing Radio PSAs
There is still one more subject you should address when planning your radio production - whether to localize your PSAs. There are several different ways to localize radio PSAs including:
- Providing live announcer scripts for the on-air personality to read with local phone numbers and contact information
- Providing a "donut" with "holes" for stations to insert localized information recorded by their own personalities or announcers
- Providing stations a fully produced localized version with VO of the local tag already inserted on the CD.
Evaluation
It is vitally important to evaluate the impact of your radio PSA for several reasons:
- It will help your distributor target the stations to receive your next PSA, based on those that used your previous campaign
- It helps your distributor update their data base of radio station PSA decision-makers and station PSA preferences
- It serves as feedback on where your PSAs are getting used (geographically), as well as what types of audiences you are reaching by analyzing the station formats where PSAs were aired
- It helps justify the cost for producing and distributing subsequent campaigns because management will be able to see in specific terms what they received in return for their investment
There are a variety of evaluation techniques that can be employed to provide usage data on radio PSAs, including telephone surveys, analyzing phone calls when toll-free numbers are used in the PSA, and the most commonly used technique, which is the bounce-back card. The BRC is inserted into the package with other materials mailed to stations and should include a postage-paid indicia on the reverse to maximize response rates.
The quality and response that you get will largely be determined by how well the BRC is designed. Open ended questions where stations can provide subjective, or vague feedback, should be avoided, because the evaluator must interpret what stations mean by "TFN" (Till Further Notice), "ROS" (Run of Station) and other meaningless comments.
To obtain fairly accurate and meaningful usage data, we design questions that ask stations to provide very specific data that is necessary to provide meaningful usage reports. The critical pieces of information that are needed include: what spot length was used; how often (number of times per week; and what time frame (number of weeks). To make it easy for stations to complete the BRC, we use a design where stations can simply circle frequency and duration of usage. In addition to usage data, other information that should be on your response card includes spaces for providing the name of public service director, station call letters and format of the station
We often are asked how did our PSA compare to others you handle? To answer the question, we use a benchmark resulting from 43 radio campaigns we distributed over several years. Using benchmark data, the average value for a radio PSA campaigns is $750,000 in free airtime, a solid return on an investment of $40,000 in production and distribution.
Your evaluation reports should provide the standard type of feedback on usage, i.e. name of station, format, number of plays by spot length, estimated dollar value and gross impressions with a user friendly recap of these statistics. If you have local offices, it is also useful to have your evaluation reports sorted by those offices so you can see where your coverage is strongest and weakest.
New Evaluation Methods
To supplement bounce-back cards which everyone admits are not as accurate as electronic tracking, there are a few new monitoring services available that should be used to track your radio PSA exposure. We have successfully tested one called MediaGuide and in our tests, electronic tracking has contributed 40% more exposure than when only bounce-back cards are used. However, since there is no electronic service that can track PSA usage on all U.S. radio stations, it is important to use both monitoring methods but make sure your evaluator's software is programmed to avoid redundant reporting from the two sources.
Reminder Postcards
Our many years of evaluating radio PSA campaigns indicates there is a very substantial amount of radio exposure that occurs for all PSA campaigns that typically goes unreported unless you take some type of follow-up action.
While the vast majority of radio stations to which your PSA is sent will not respond, that does not mean they are non-users. No matter how simple you make it for stations to respond, there will be a fairly consistent number - about 30% - that use, but do not respond to a PSA mailing. To try and capture some of this usage, we often employ reminder postcards. Designed as a two-part postcard, this device typically includes a short note to the public service director, and a response card that is identical to the one sent with the original package. These cards can generate significant increases in reported usage rates and exposure levels as shown in the graph.
To summarize, radio PSAs can be one of the most cost-effective mass communications techniques you can employ to get your message out to both general audiences and discrete populations.
Radio PSAs offer flexibility; they permit you to reach audiences out-of-home; they are comparatively inexpensive; and they provide a good return on investment. However, to maximize your return, like any other mass communications tool, you should establish objectives and develop a thorough plan for your campaign.
Bill Goodwill is CEO of Goodwill Communications, a Virginia-based company that specializes in PSA distribution and evaluation. His firm has distributed more than 200 national radio PSA campaigns.
