My partner, Joe Barone, calls radio the redheaded stepchild of advertising. Now, I never understood that because there are no redheads on radio, but after 15 years of writing and producing radio ads, I think I finally know what he means.
When you do a TV ad, you get to go to L.A., pretend you’re in "The Business," sit on neat canvas chairs while some wonky-eyed director yells, "Action!" and "Cut!" and maybe even go to Cannes, where you can work hard on your "I’m really cool so don’t bother me" chops.
Cannes is where they invented all that stuff. (Don’t tell the ad guys, cool is now in Berlin.)
Radio production is a slightly different animal. For starters, the radio mixer actually is an animal. You might not know that because usually you only get to see the back of his head. Nobody ever yells, "Action!" They just say things like, "Do it again," "Do it faster" and "Put a smile on it." There are a lot of good jokes in a radio session, but they’re usually told by a 70-year-old voiceover dude who hands you a rose and tells you to punch his gut as hard as you can.
Now don’t get me wrong. I enjoy being handed a radio brief and told to have six spots written, produced and shipped in 48 hours as much as the next guy. And you may not believe this, but I’m actually embarrassed to be seen on a plane heading to LAX.
My friend Bert Berdis is always telling me I need to go out to L.A. and visit. He doesn’t understand when I tell him it’s a shirt thing. I just don’t have the shirts for L.A. When I go out there, the first thing I always do is go to Melrose and buy shirts. You just can’t get good L.A. shirts in NYC.
Once, Joe and I were in L.A. working on a spot. I got out there first, so I thought I’d give him a treat and went to the airport in a red Mercedes convertible to pick him up. You can’t get more L.A. than a red Merc convertible with the top down. He made me drive right back to Hertz and turn it in. The counter guy was confused when Joe pointed to a wreck in the parking lot and said, "Give me that." (It turned out to be the counter guy’s car.) I learned a lot about what it is to be a real New Yorker at that counter.
And real New Yorkers are radio guys. Oh, I’m not saying there are no good radio guys in L.A.—there’s a whole bunch of them there—but a real New Yorker thinks anything resembling the sun is suspicious, the Lexington Avenue express is first class travel, and four cups of coffee, three cigarettes and a bagel with cream cheese—jelly if you’ve got it—is the breakfast of champions. Real radio guys are the same way.
