Radio’s power as an ad medium is undeniable. But what makes a message truly move a listener isn’t just creativity; it’s psychology. Now, a marketer and behavioral science author is unpacking the hidden words and messages behind great radio ads.
Richard Shotton’s newest book, Hacking the Human Mind, maps more than a century of experiments on why people change behavior. He joined Oxford Road Chief Creative Officer Stu Redwine on the Ad Infinitum podcast to transform that theory into practical application for anyone writing, producing, or selling radio advertising today. What emerges is a science of sound persuasion.
When Shotton talks about the “human hack,” he’s not describing manipulation; he’s describing efficiency. “The hack is always easier to work with human nature than against it,” Shotton explains. “And behavioral science is just 130 years of experiments into how you effectively harness human behavior to get people to change.”
That concept reframes the goal of an ad. It’s not to inform or even entertain; it’s to shape what someone does next. “Everything you’re trying to do in marketing is about changing behavior,” he tells Redwine. “You want people to buy more of your brand, switch from a competitor, or pay a premium. They are all questions of behavior change.”
Redwine’s creative interpretation positions audio as the ideal testing ground. Because people often listen while doing other tasks, their defenses are down. Their conscious mind multitasks, leaving the subconscious more open to suggestion. A 1960s experiment by psychologist Leon Festinger, which found that participants were more persuadable while distracted, forms the scientific backbone for radio’s greatest strength: engagement through divided attention.
The discussion turns to language, specifically, why so much advertising fails to stick. The culprit, Shotton remarks, is abstraction. Marketers lean on vague descriptors like “premium,” “trusted,” or “innovative,” but the human brain doesn’t store abstractions. It remembers what it can see.
“The original studies were done back in 1972 by Ian Begg,” Shotton notes. “What Begg finds is that on average people remember 9% of the abstractions, but they remember 36% of the concrete phrases. So you’ve got this massive fourfold difference in memorability. According to Begg, vision is the most powerful of our senses.”
This creates one of radio’s core creative challenges: making listeners see without seeing.
“Think now about audio,” he continues. “How many brands talk about being high quality or premium or trustworthy? They are talking about simple ideas that we all have the cognitive capability of understanding, but because they’re abstract, people cannot remember them. What the best brands do is translate the objectives on the brief into language people can visualize.”
“Red Bull didn’t say Red Bull gives you energy. That would have been abstract. What they say instead is Red Bull gives you wings. And because you can picture wings, you can picture someone flapping. That is a message that is far more likely to stick in someone’s mind.”
For radio writers, that’s the difference between forgettable and unforgettable copy. Words like “better,” “stronger,” and “smarter” dissolve on-air. But specific, image-driven phrases lodge in memory, lighting up the same visual pathways as sight.
When Redwine asks what drives believability, Shotton introduces the concept of “costly signaling.” In plain terms, people believe a message more if they think the advertiser spent real money to deliver it.
“The key line is only a company with genuine faith in their product would invest for the long term,” Shotton says. “This essentially talks about costly signaling… if people think [a shoe] brand is going to spend $20 million on advertising, so twice the normal amount a brand might spend, they rate those [shoes] at 14% higher quality scores than if they think the brand is just going to spend $2 million.”
Shotton links this to another behavioral principle: the mere exposure effect. “Familiarity breeds contentment, not contempt,” he notes. “He argues from an evolutionary perspective, if we repeatedly see a stimulus and it doesn’t hurt us or cause us any pain, then we will grow warm to it. We don’t need more information about it, but it’s this regularity that breeds that warmth.”
For stations and agencies selling campaigns, that’s scientific reinforcement of radio’s long-held argument: repetition builds results.
Shotton’s closing challenge to the industry is direct. “For any chief audio officer out there, immerse yourself in behavioral science,” he urges. “I think this stuff is so practical. You can take an experiment and an insight, test it on your brands and see if it works yourself. And because you’re basing the insight on peer-reviewed observed experiments, these things tend to be far more influential than other sources.”
