The State of Radio Ads In 2025: Pierre Bouvard on What’s Next

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From the impact of dull ads to the opportunities of innovations like geotargeting, how are the best brands making strategies that drive success?

Radio Ink sat down with Cumulus Media/Westwood One Chief Insights Officer Pierre Bouvard to discuss the latest findings from the Audio Active Group’s Creative Best Practices Handbook and the evolution of radio advertising in 2025.

Radio Ink: In your guide, you reference a study that found the most prevalent average emotion attached to AM/FM ads in the US isn’t surprise or happiness or even contempt, it’s neutrality – which technically isn’t an emotion at all. What is the number one factor creating these dull ads?

Pierre Bouvard: I think the issue is maybe, at its heart, a misunderstanding among retailers and some advertisers of how advertising works. I think the perception is you put an ad in front of somebody and they will immediately buy. Except all of the experts in marketing effectiveness say, “No, that’s not how advertising works.” Advertising works by creating memories. People consult their memories in the future if they happen to have a need.

If we mistakenly think everyone is in the market right now, we’re going to make our ads sound like everyone is just getting ready to buy something right now.

This leads to all these ads that sound like direct response ads. “We have a sale right now.” “We have this thing right now.” So they’re dull. They’re very rational. They’re full of boring facts and figures.

The reality is that only 5% of Americans are in the market for anything right now. Not 100% – only 5%. This data comes from one of the most prestigious institutes of marketing science, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science. Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t do sales event ads. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be trying to convert existing demand. But the big question for America’s retail advertisers is, what about the other 95%? What are you gonna do to create a future memory? That’s brand building. That’s about being funny and entertaining and creating positive feelings so that if and when in the future I come into the market, I will remember you because you put a smile on my face.

Radio Ink: Let’s go counter-intuitive. Obviously, brands want to have that positive reinforcement, but contempt was one of the emotions that was measured in the study. Is it better to have an ad that breeds contempt as opposed to one that fosters neutrality?

Pierre Bouvard: System1 is a global market research company that specializes in testing advertising creative across all media, across all countries. They will tell you that very few ads create significant amounts of contempt. You have to consistently be a lunatic to create ads that create a lot of contempt. So luckily, contempt or negative emotions are really not the problem of advertising. The biggest problem of advertising is dull ads.

Radio Ink: Another note in your best practices guide is how brands that change agencies less produce higher quality creative. Does this extend to local production? Do you see turnover or elimination of production director jobs harming local radio ad performance?

Pierre Bouvard: That consistency finding was from another major study that System1 underwrote that had to do with consistency on multiple levels.

First, does the advertiser have consistent brand assets? For example, O’Reilly’s has a jingle that they have jealously guarded and maintained for decades and resisted the temptation to change, eliminate, or make unrecognizable. So at first, it has to do with the brand itself and their taglines and the music they use.

Then it also extends to the agency. They found that if you change agencies a lot your consistency erodes and what happens? Your ads don’t test as well and your sales don’t grow as well. So yes, consistency is a big best practice, but it applies to many, many things.

Now, does changing a production director at a radio station hurt the consistency of a local advertiser? I don’t know. I’m hoping that local advertiser has a consistent theme of music or slogans and taglines, and they will jealously guard that and maintain that regardless of who’s producing the ads.

Radio Ink: Not every brand has jingle money, especially locally. While some clients do have custom-made sonic branding and beds, would even using the same generic music bed from an imaging provider over and over conceivably create the same effect?

Pierre Bouvard: Yes, just like Home Depot has had the exact same piece of music for 15 years or so.

I think what every retailer has to do is literally – on a piece of paper – ask themselves, what are my distinctive brand assets? Is it my logo, the color of my logo, the shape of the logo? Is it my jingle? Is it a slogan? Is it certain offers? Really sit down and ask, what makes me unique? Then codify that and say, “Whatever kind of advertising we do, we have to stick to these distinctive brand assets.”

Radio Ink: And that’s also a good thing for the salespeople to keep in mind when they’re pitching a client.

Pierre Bouvard: Exactly.

Radio Ink: So a controversial topic you talked about in your guide is 60-second spots. Some consider them poison in a TikTok attention-span society and you say the length of the ad doesn’t actually matter. Why is that?

Pierre Bouvard: So there are two big questions I probably get asked most frequently about creative best practices. And interestingly, they are two things that people do not have to worry about.

One thing you don’t have to worry about is ad length. The point is you can have a :20, a :30, and a :60 that are effective and well-branded. We have not seen any evidence that there is any magic to the actual length of the ad.

Now, what you do with that time can have a significant good or bad impact. Sometimes a :60 can cause writers to get very undisciplined and create a lot of extra messaging and a lot of extra points that actually are confusing.

So for example, a very smart guy out of the UK, Jason Brownlee, has a company called Colourtext. He did look at word count and there is an inverse relationship. The more words you have in your ad, the less effective. For every 10 words you can eliminate, search and site attribution improves.

So it’s not the length; the more different points and messages you put into your commercial, the less people remember anything. Are you disciplined and focused, or are you just creating a blender with the top off?

Radio Ink: Let’s talk about the year ahead. JCPenney, a legacy brand that was on the brink of extinction not too long ago, has been enjoying a resurgence. We saw them pop up repeatedly on Media Monitors Spot Ten reports of the top national radio advertisers during Q4. Brands are increasingly picking up AM/FM and seeing results, which is something the Audio Active Group regularly reports.

Do you predict more of this in 2025? And are there any verticals you think will be looking to especially harness terrestrial radio?

Pierre Bouvard: So for sure, pharma. Pharma has really discovered radio. When I got into this job 10 years ago I couldn’t remember hearing one pharma ad. A lot of media planning decisions are made based on kind of speculation and the myth at the time was that the disclaimer sounds terrible on the radio we don’t have any visuals to distract people. That was untrue.

Look at all of the pharma brands that are now on radio and now, in the TV ads, a lot of these brands are using jingles to make their brand name more memorable.

The other category is Consumer Packaged Goods. For many years, P&G had the world’s best-kept secret about radio and radio’s ability to drive incremental reach and to drive sales, but we’re seeing more CPG brands discovering radio, especially to make their TV better.

80% of TV impressions these days come from folks over the age of 50. So that means every dollar you spend on TV, 80 cents goes to somebody over the age of 50. Nothing wrong with that, but if you care about 18 to 49s, where can you find more 18 to 49s?

All roads lead to radio. So I think you’ll see CPG popping up more.

One more category that has been strong, but I think it’s just going to continue to grow is B2B. What marketers like Granger and CDW know is that business decision-makers are found listening to the radio in the car and at work. So that’s a strong category, but I predict future growth.

Radio Ink: As we discussed with AMA CEO Paul Kelly, given the FCC’s new FM booster allowances, will 2025 be the year that geotargeting becomes a real growth area for advertising in terrestrial radio?

Pierre Bouvard: So ZoneCasting is now the law of the land. Let’s look at other media. There is a multi-billion dollar industry in cable called Zone Cable, where I as a local retailer can just buy the north side of town. Retailers like to target ads geographically – social ads, banner ads, video ads, online audio ads. Almost every American media industry can target by geography and now radio is finally getting it.

I think you’re going to see this expand the retailer base. There are a lot of retailers that will say, “I’m in Wilkes-Barre and my customer base is in Wilkes-Barre but the Nielsen metro is this sprawling multi-county thing with Scranton and this and that. If you could show me the ability just for me to just reach Wilkes-Barre, then I’d be super interested.”

I think another one of the things we’re going to discover is a big opportunity in political. Again, there are a lot of politicians who care about certain geographic areas. They love Zone Cable for that and geotargeted YouTube and geotargeted banner ads. Now they’ll have geotargeted over-the-air AM/FM radio for political.

Radio Ink: And are there any other trends that you really have your eyes on for the year ahead for radio?

Pierre Bouvard: One of the most critical initiatives for our industry is to combat misperceptions. For the past decade here at the Audio Active Group, we have been surveying hundreds and hundreds of advertisers and agencies each year and asking them simple questions like, “What percent of Americans are reached by radio in a typical week?”

They’ll tell you right away it’s 47%. But Nielsen tells you it’s 90%.

So there are tremendous misperceptions, but I’ve started to notice radio broadcasters using their big megaphone and their platform to market to advertisers. I’ve been hearing a bunch of promos on iHeart stations targeting advertisers about the benefits of radio’s mass reach, plus its digital extensions.

That doesn’t cost us anything as an industry. We tend to think that only listeners listen to our station, but guess what? Advertisers listen to our station. In fact, we reach nine out of 10 advertisers. They don’t know it. So I think you’ll see more broadcasters realizing this dual audience and using their airwaves to promote the benefits of advertising on radio to combat misperceptions.

The only other thing that I’ll bring up as a trend that’s worth noting is podcasting. In the early ’70s, a lot of broadcasters laughed at FM. It wasn’t in the car. It was only for young people. It was like 15 or 20 percent of listening. Flash forward, podcasting is the new FM.

Just as the industry jumped on the FM bandwagon and figured it out, local radio needs to jump on the podcast bandwagon. Some of that can be repurposing content that’s already on the radio station into a podcast. Some of it might be creating new unique podcasts that serve our local communities. The CPM of podcasting is quadruple radio, so just like we got into FM in the ’70s, I think every local station needs to be activating its podcast strategy.

Radio Ink: And they need to put it on YouTube, right?

Pierre Bouvard: Yeah, yeah, you know, that’s the cool thing about podcasting. In cable, if you have a network, you have to pay every distributor, but in podcasting, distribution is free so you create some good content and get it out there.

The Audio Active Group Creative Best Practices Handbook is available to download here.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Compelling stories, instead of left brain CTAs, break through the wall of mediocrity and create memories. Then when that potential customer has a need, and does an organic search, those memories cause that person to click on the advertiser whose campaign created those memories. The stations I work with are seeing this drive sales even with less than optimum schedules.

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