By Erik Cudd
“New insights” from iHeartMedia are giving guidance on effective audio advertising: sound conversational, focus on one audience and one core message, establish relevance quickly, use authentic voices, keep the copy simple and let production support the idea rather than overwhelm it.
Good advice. But very familiar advice.
Roy H. Williams has spent decades teaching these fundamentals through Wizard of Ads. Find the central idea. Speak to the listener as a person. Eliminate “ad-speak.” Create emotional relevance. Stop cramming every possible fact about a business into one commercial.
Radio Ink readers know this well. Williams has been an Art of Advertising columnist for this publication for many years now, and his principles have influenced serious radio creative thinking for decades. So why is foundational advertising knowledge treated as fresh discovery inside a company that once employed people who understood it, taught it and applied it?
Fighting for Revenue on Two Fronts
Broadcasters defend terrestrial revenue while competing for digital dollars against technology platforms, streaming companies, social networks, and sophisticated targeting systems promising advertisers scale and measurable results.
That raises the stakes for creative. Mediocre advertising isn’t simply an aesthetic failure; it’s competitive liability.
The advertiser eventually asks one question: Did it work?
Consolidation steadily reduced the people whose job it was to help make sure it did. Local staff shrank, creative functions centralized, and experienced production directors and creative services professionals disappeared through successive rounds of restructuring.
iHeart isn’t alone, but it’s one of the industry’s most visible examples. There are legitimate reasons to consolidate operations and reduce costs. This isn’t an argument for recreating the staffing chart of 1995. It’s an argument for recognizing what gets lost when creative expertise is treated primarily as overhead.
Clear Channel Already Knew This
More than 20 years ago, Clear Channel Radio, iHeartMedia’s predecessor, created a national Creative Resource Group that became its Creative Services Group. Its purpose went beyond producing commercials. The company wanted to improve advertising, train its people, and help stations deliver better results for clients. Jim Cook, then senior vice president of creative services, led the effort.
In a 2004 interview with Radio And Production, Cook said local producers and writers understood what made good radio and bad radio, then made a remarkable admission:
“Many times we’ve forced them to do the wrong thing.”
Cook said account executives needed more education about creative and argued that shortening bad 60-second commercials into bad :30s wasn’t progress. He stressed getting advertising down to a single message, calling the concept basic Marketing 101.
Clear Channel also brought outside expertise into the organization.
Cook confirmed the company would work with Roy Williams to help meet its creative goals. Dick Orkin and positioning pioneer Jack Trout were also enlisted, while seminars brought sales, programming, and production people together to improve the work.
In other words, Clear Channel already knew creative mattered. It knew local producers possessed valuable expertise. It knew sellers needed to understand messaging before an order reached production. It knew single-message advertising worked, and it knew enough about Williams’ philosophy to bring him inside the company.
That isn’t nostalgia; it’s institutional history.
Where Did the Knowledge Go?
A strong production director isn’t simply the person who makes the spot. The best understand why the spot should exist in the first place.
Those trained in Wizard of Ads principles understand something more fundamental: production isn’t decoration added after the strategy.
Creative execution is part of the strategy.
That’s institutional knowledge, and corporate memory has a peculiar way of becoming “new insight” once the people who carried it are gone.
Bad Creative Is Now a Bigger Revenue Problem
The danger isn’t whether a commercial wins an award. It’s whether the advertiser comes back. When a client runs a cluttered, unfocused commercial and sees little response, the conclusion usually isn’t that the message lacked focus or emotional relevance.
It’s much simpler: “Radio doesn’t work.”
Today, that judgment can spread beyond broadcast. Put the same weak creative into streaming, podcasts, and digital inventory, and the advertiser may conclude those products don’t work either. For an industry trying to grow revenue across platforms, creative expertise should be considered revenue infrastructure.
Technology can make production faster, centralization can make it cheaper, AI can assist with drafts, versions, and routine work. None of these guarantee persuasion.
A company can become extraordinarily efficient at producing ineffective advertising.
If radio wants a larger share of digital spending, it can’t move weak advertising from the transmitter to the server and expect a different result.
Hire for What the Guidance Says Matters
If radio believes authenticity, message discipline, emotional relevance, trusted voices, and thoughtful production drive advertising performance, leadership should ask a straightforward question: Do we still employ enough people whose expertise is making those things happen?
There are veteran production directors, creative services directors, writers, and producers who’ve spent decades learning this work. Some have deep Wizard of Ads backgrounds. Others reached the same understanding through thousands of campaigns and years of working directly with advertisers.
Hire them deliberately.
Put them into the process early enough to matter. Let them work with sellers before the copy is finished, and measure their value beyond the number of spots produced. Look at advertiser retention, repeat business, campaign performance, and the quality of the advertising carrying the company’s brands across broadcast and digital platforms.
That isn’t a return to the past. It’s applying a lesson Clear Channel understood more than 20 years ago. It’s time we hired like it.
Erik Cudd is a three-decade broadcast professional and journalist living outside Washington, DC.
