Financial Considerations

There is never a set price when creating a radio advert; the costs can vary depending on what you want. The general costs of advertising are £2 for every 1000 listeners, the more people that listen to the advert then the more expensive is gets. The amount of times an advert is played and depending on what time of day will increase the costs.

 The most popular times the radio is listened to is in the morning or around later afternoon (drive time), if you wanted your radio advert played at these times it will cost a lot more. The length of the advert is also a cost issue, if your advert takes up more time than other it will be more expensive to air. Usually adverts are about 30 seconds long; anything below 30 seconds is less money and anything over is more.

You will need to choose a radio station you want your advert to be played on. Depending on what your advert is about and what type of audience it is targeted at will decide what radio station you should choose. The station will play your advert for around a month.

Script writing, voice-overs, music, sound effects and the equipment used to create your advert; plus trafficking costs will cost quite a lot. For a radio station to produce and play your advert would cost around £2,910 or £3,500 plus VAT.  Advert slots are always sold in groups, there is never only 1 sold at a time. For example if I was to buy slots for my advert, I would get about 40 slots spread out through a few weeks over different days. Also Key 103 play another 40 of your adverts on their sister channel MAGIC 1152.

Here is a Key 103 rate card as an example of how many times your advert would get played in a week, and how many times in a day. 

Music

When adding music to radio adverts there are laws that radio companies have to follow. Some songs are owned by the artist / band, unless you have permission to use a certain song then you cannot use it; this is called copywrite. Royalties means you can play the song but you have to pay the artist / band to use it. Without music being played in the background of adverts then they would sound very boring to the audience. This is why music is important when producing radio adverts. Choosing a certain song will depend on the context of the advert, for example if the voice over on the advert was humours and cheerful an upbeat song would be used. Producers usually choose the music that will work well when advertising a certain product but they don't always have a wide variety of music to choose from. This is because a lot of the popular songs played on the radio have copywrites and can't be used for an advert.

Some advertisers and radio stations aren't too sure about what songs they are allowed to play so this makes choosing songs a lot more complicated. Radio stations have licenses to play songs but they do not allow them to be used for adverts. If an advertising company uses a song they are not allowed to use, then the legal responsibility is on their hands and is nothing to do with the radio station.

There a few rules to follow:

Fair use: When a song has copywrite it is illegal to use, fair use grants limited use of a song without needing permission. As long as the song cannot be recognized by the audience and isn't played for a long period of time then it is ok to use; otherwise it is illegal.

Licensing: If you wanted to play certain songs for radio adverts you can get a license to use the music. Two licenses are needed, one from the owner of the song and one from the owners of the copywrite.

The 7 second rule: Quite a lot of radio advertisers use this rule which means you can use 7 seconds of a song in your advert. This rule does not exist and doing this is breaking the copywrite law because you need a licence to play any copywrited music.

Strategies: To get a license for a copywrited song is very complicated and expensive, another option some radio advertiser’s use is to create your own music and get a musician to perform for you.

A radio station needs a license to use commercial music. Here is a link for a website of a company PRS 'Performance Right Society'. On this website there it has all the information and costs about licenses for music.
 http://www.prsformusic.com/users/broadcastandonline/Radio/radio_advertising/Pages/radioadvertising.aspx 

In college we have a radio station and use sounds fx and music. All of this is royalty and copywrite free which means we can use this in our own radio advertising. None of the songs we use are copywrited so we didn't pay for any although we do have a library of music that we paid for also. These can also be used as part of our radio shows and adverts.

Here a few example of sound fx and music we have for the college radio.

Production Roles

To run an advertising company a few roles are needed. In large companies there are usually a lot of people all with different roles. Although, if it is a small company most of the experts will have multiple roles. 

A creative producer supervises the production of a radio shows and creates the jingles, sounds and audio. They can help out with the technical side of things; they can operate the controls for the presenters. Usually they are in separate rooms to the radio presenters so they don’t get distracted and no unwanted sounds ae picked up whilst they’re on air.

Recording engineers are involved with the recording, manipulation, mixing and reproduction of sound. They make the sounds for the jingles and radio adverts. To be a recording engineer you must understand how everything works within the studio. For example you must be able to mix and edit, fade in and fade out music and the voices on air. Equipment like mixing consoles, microphones and an audio workstation will usually be used.

A Radio Copywriter writes scripts for radio adverts. They need to know how radios are listened to, how the audience respond, and what attracts the listeners. Usually good copywriters have been involved with radio production in the past; sometimes they are writing scripts and being the producer.

Voice-over artists are used for all kinds of things, animation, TV adverts, videos games, radio adverts and a lot more. Voice-over is a production technique used where the voice is non-diegetic. This means the voice isn't part of the narrative and is added in afterwards. Voice overs are also used on the radio to remind the audience of the station name. There are 3 different categories of voice overs. Voice actors (which are the most popular), these are professionals and are directed how to say the lines. Celebrity voice overs is another category, these have more an effect on the listeners because the voices are known. The last is session vocalist, these sing the jingles. For example the Wonga advert - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxdbu8b4ITk 

This is a link to order and buy a voice over, you can choose from a variety of voices.   http://www.musicradiocreative.com/voices  

Production Facilities

In the production of radio commercials, there are a lot of things needed for them to be up to the professional standards in which they need to be aired. Most commercials are made in house however; some radio stations give you the option for them to create one for you.

The first thing you need to consider before you start the production is how and where you are going to create your commercial. There are a few production companies such as SpotWorks, SP Media and RPC Audio these have the facilities and equipment to help create your advert up to a professional level to be aired on a radio. However; some radio stations give you the option for them to create one for you.

Within the studio a voice booth is needed to record the script for your commercial. The voice booth will be sound proof, this helps pick up the voice in better quality and keeps other sounds out when recording. These sound proof rooms are usually used within the radio industry, when the radio presenter is on air they don’t want to hear other noises other than their voice that could distract them and the audience. They are also used for live music on the radio.

An editing workstation is also a main piece of equipment needed. These are used for recording, editing and playing back digital audio. A mixing board is used for changing the levels of volume, changing songs and jingles and combining everything together.

Professional software should be used to finally put everything together and edit it all. There are quite a few different types of software to choose from; such as Reaper, Audacity and Adobe Audition. The software is free except Adobe Audition. I have used reaper before when creating jingles for my college radio station. It was used to put my clips in the order I was happy with, cutting clips down and adding background music.

Adobe audition and Myriad are the two most used software for large advertising companies.

Reaper 

 















Audacity

Introduction

­­­I have been asked to create a producers guide to radio commercial production. The guide can be presented in either written or audio format, I have chosen to upload written guide to my blog. The guide I will produce will include: 

• location, range and content of commercial production facilities
• jobs available in radio commercial production
• the production, purpose and styles of music used in radio commercial production budgeting and financial considerations in radio commercial production.