Your audience is distracted, they’re over-communicated, they’ve had too much coffee, or not enough. In other words, they’re difficult to engage. How do you keep their attention for a full 15, 30, or 60 seconds? Hook ‘em and keep pulling. What pulls? Consistent variations.
What the…?
Those advertising to attention-deficit disordered folks see audiences get distracted, bored, and disengaged very easily. What can you do? Vary the pace, tone, or rhythm of your commercial. And do it consistently throughout the commercial.
How can you do this in a single-voice commercial?
The voice can speed up, slow down, or become louder or softer. There may be a reason to use an accent or technical effect (stutter, reverb, filter, delay, compress, extend, double or triple, etc.). The voice can imitate someone who’s younger, older, the opposite sex or a completely different personality. The voice can imitate the sounds of tools, engines, nature sounds, animals, objects, or abstract ideas. It can convey emotional changes. It’s all the stuff a good storyteller uses.
One voice can talk to itself. The legendary Ken Nordine taught me the technique of a voice having a conversation with a filtered version of oneself. Check him out.
Poets, singers, orators – when they perform, will vary, stretch, take liberties with the rhythm and phrasing, so it doesn’t get sing-songy. In music, it’s called tempo rubato (gotta love the Italians).
Think of your commercial as the landscape you observe on a journey. The variations in the scenery will provide emotional interest. Continuing the same rhythm throughout your commercial can lull the audience to sleep. Remember, you have 4 elements to work with: voices, music, sound effects, and silence.
What opportunities are there in your advertising message to use each? I don’t mean just employing them randomly, I mean how can you use each in a way that will enhance, clarify, or intensify the message and engage the listener?
Adding other voices to your message will help boost the variety. Appropriate changes in music, sound effects that amplify rather than distract, and the use of silence will reduce the wall-to-wall carpet of words that makes many commercials blend into the background.
Read through your script, listening as much as you can from the audience’s perspective. Notice the places where you start to lose interest. Rewrite to keep the audience’s attention. Radio’s power is its emotional bond with the audience. Variety will help keep that bond. This is especially important at the end of the spot during the call to action. Listeners would rather be invited to make their own choice, rather than being sold.
Wonder how this technique would work for one of your advertisers? Email me [email protected], and I’ll show you how to apply it.
