The most effective ad campaigns cannot be ignored. Ineffective ad campaigns are easily ignored.

Most ads are not written to persuade.
They are written not to offend.

When a message has the power to move people, a percentage of those people will be moved in the wrong direction. Get over it. A lack of complaints is proof that your ads are being ignored.

The message below was left on the answering machine of a Wizard of Ads client.

My partners toasted that client with a bottle of Dom Perignon when they heard this telephone message.

The guy who left this message remembers EVERYTHING abut the ad. That ad campaign is working fabulously, by the way. You need to know Rick Willis.

The Time Spent Listening (TSL) of hundreds of thousands of Americans is measured daily by Nielsen Media Research. Each of these people carries a Portable People Meter, a small digital device that KNOWS what station you are listening to, the exact moment when you began listening, and the precise moment when you quit listening. Radio measurement is not speculative.  Nielsen knows as much about America’s radio audience as Facebook and Google know about the online audience.

In Austin, the city where I live, the daily sample size is 975 individuals and those Portable People Meters are handed off to a different 975 people every 6 weeks. To put this in perspective, The Gallup Poll uses only 1,050 individuals to measure the opinions of the entire United States of America.

I share this information only to help you understand that any radio schedule that airs enough ads to reach the AVERAGE listener with sufficient repetition for radio do its job, will reach the heaviest users of radio with a potentially annoying amount of repetition. These outliers – the heaviest users of radio – are always vocal, but they do not speak for the masses. – Roy H. Williams