Award-Winning Radio Commercial

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Later in my career, I moved my business to an office in Winooski Vermont. I needed more space and just felt it was time for a change. The owner of the building was a nice guy. He owned a small insurance agency in the same building. He came to me one day asking if I could help him grow his business without spending very much money. I told him that had been what I had done for my entire career. Turns out he had accumulated quite a bit of trade (he swapped insurance for radio time) with a local radio station (the nice station that I had a great relationship with). He'd been running some station-produced commercials for a while but nothing was happening. That didn't surprise me. Station-produced commercials were always ineffective because they weren't creative. Rightly so. The radio station wasn't in the business of being creative. They cranked out stuff to put on the air.

I knew the commercials really had to be different, which was a terrific creative challenge for me since I wasn't really making much money from this client. So that's what I did. In the first campaign there was a commercial "I Lost My House" (listen above) that was quite different and really got attention. People were quoting it in stores! This campaign alone gave Winooski Insurance at least a 10% increase in market share. I could tell by the number of agents he was adding.

The second campaign really made an impact. The first commercial was one that almost didn't get produced. The owner came to me after reading the script and said the opinion around the office was that it would offend people. For which I gave him my favorite quote from my dear departed friend, Bill Wheeler, "Advertising that offends no one, sells no one". I told the owner it ran as is or I walked. It ran. It won awards. It gained another 10% market share.