Audio Ad Examples: What the Good Ones Sound Like, With Three Full Scripts

A fifteen-second audio ad holds about thirty-five words at the speed a human being actually talks, a thirty holds seventy-five and a sixty holds a hundred and sixty. Almost every collection of audio ad examples on the internet ignores that arithmetic, which is why reading one rarely helps anybody who has to produce a spot by Friday. The examples below are written out in full, counted, and labelled with the length they were built for, and all three are original. Nielsen's Audio Today reporting has put broadcast radio's weekly reach in the region of nine in ten American adults for years running, and Edison Research's annual Infinite Dial study has tracked online audio listening climbing alongside it. The medium is not the problem. The copy usually is.

Thirty-Five Words, Seventy-Five, a Hundred and Sixty

Length is the first decision and it governs everything after it. A :15 has room for one sentence of setup, one turn and a tag, which means it works as a reminder for a business the listener has already heard of and fails as an introduction. A :30 is the workhorse, long enough for a situation and a laugh and short enough that nobody reaches for the dial. A :60 is a different craft entirely, because sixty seconds of a single voice reading benefits is unbearable, and the length only earns itself when something changes halfway through.

Every production element spends from the same account. A sound effect costs a second. A pause before a punchline costs a second and usually pays for itself. A phone number read slowly enough to be written down costs three to four seconds, which on a :30 is more than a tenth of the spot. The scripts below come in under their counts on purpose, because the ones that come in over get fixed in the booth by a voice talent reading faster, and a rushed read is the single most recognisable sound in bad local radio. Our breakdown of the craft rules behind a script that survives a car radio goes through the cutting process.

THE SHELF, Fifteen Seconds in Telford

Original :15, two voices plus announcer, fictional client.

SFX: tape measure snapping shut.
MAN: It's a quarter inch too wide.
WOMAN: So we're not getting it.
MAN: We're getting it. I'm taking out a wall.
ANNOUNCER: Hoffman Appliance, Telford. We measure before you decide. Delivery's free.

Thirty-four spoken words. One idea, which is that the store measures first so the customer does not end up renovating. The spot opens inside a conversation already underway, which is the only reliable way to hold the first three seconds of a :15, and it never explains itself. There is no address and no phone number, because either would have cost the joke and a search bar does that work for nothing. The name lands once, in the only line that can afford to carry it.

UNIT 14, Thirty Seconds in Quakertown

Original :30, voicemail plus two voices, fictional client.

SFX: metal roll-up door, then a phone on speaker.
VOICEMAIL, MOTHER: Honey, it's your mother. I am standing in your old bedroom and there are nine boxes marked college.
MAN: I know about the boxes.
VOICEMAIL: One of them is breathing.
MAN: That's a fan.
VOICEMAIL: They're going on the porch Saturday.
ANNOUNCER: Keystone Self Storage, Route 309 in Quakertown. Climate-controlled units, month to month, starting at a size that holds nine boxes marked college.
MAN: Eleven. There are eleven.
ANNOUNCER: Keystone Self Storage. Quakertown.

Seventy-eight spoken words. The structure is worth copying even if the premise is not. A voicemail is the cheapest way in radio to establish two characters and a deadline in nine seconds, because a listener accepts a recorded voice without needing to be told who is speaking or where anybody is. The product appears once, in plain terms, in the announcer line, and the last joke runs after the sell rather than before it, so the thing the listener repeats tomorrow has the business name attached to it. The town lands twice. More structures laid out this way sit in our set of radio ad scripts that convert.

What the Extra Thirty Seconds Buys

A :60 is not a :30 with more benefits. It is two scenes, or one scene with a reversal in the middle, and a writer who cannot name what changes at the thirty-second mark should be producing a :30 and spending the difference on frequency instead. The usual shape is a situation that gets worse, then the advertiser arriving as the thing that resolves it, with the announcer copy pushed almost entirely into the last fifteen seconds.

The opening of one, for a fictional garden centre, to show the mechanic rather than fill the page. A man is talking to a plant. He apologises to it. He asks it what he did. A second voice asks who he is talking to, and he says the hydrangea, in the tone of a man who has had this conversation before. That premise can run forty seconds before anyone sells anything, because the listener is waiting to find out whether the plant answers, and the thirty-five words of actual advertising arrive while they are still waiting. Streaming inventory changes the calculation again, since a spot bought through Spotify's self-serve audio platform is usually capped at thirty seconds and plays to someone wearing headphones rather than driving.

Four Shelves in the Same Store

Finished audio ads sort into four working categories, and the sort matters more than the length, because it decides what the spot is allowed to do.

Funny. The premise does the work and the product arrives late. Expensive to write and cheap to remember, which is the trade this business is built on and the argument behind our funny radio ad production work.

Local. A named street, a named town, a voice that sounds like it lives there. The lowest-risk category and the one most often ruined by an announcer with a national accent reading about a town he cannot place.

Retail and offer-led. A date, a number and a deadline. These are the easiest to write and the fastest to stop working, because a sale that ends Sunday every Sunday teaches the listener to discount the rest of the spot.

Institutional. Dealerships, casinos, hospitals, campaigns. Long-horizon spots where nothing is on sale and the job is to be the name that surfaces later. Our notes on radio for car dealerships cover how the rotation usually gets built.

Twenty-Five Spots and a Dial

The player on this site holds twenty-five finished spots we produced, sorted across those four categories and tuned by dial position rather than a dropdown, which is a small piece of theatre that exists because scrolling a list of file names is a poor way to judge audio. Insurance, mobile phones, a casino, cat food, tax preparation, a burger chain, an events hall, a law firm, a steakfest and a theme park are all in there. Listening to six of them in a row is a better use of four minutes than reading any article about audio advertising, including this one. The funny category sits at 107.9 on the funny ads page, and what separates the best audio ads from the forgettable ones covers what to listen for.

The Examples Nobody Puts in a Portfolio

Four patterns show up in finished, paid-for spots across every market, which is how you know they survived a client review. A web address spelled out letter by letter, burning four seconds to deliver what one search would. Three adjectives stacked in front of the company name, which a listener hears as noise rather than as description. A joke with no connection to the product, remembered perfectly while the advertiser is forgotten entirely. And the opening rhetorical question about being tired of something, which announces that nothing surprising is coming.

Each one is a choice made to feel safe, and audio punishes safe harder than almost any other medium, because a spot nobody notices costs exactly as much as a spot everybody repeats. If you are weighing a producer, listen to their examples and time how long it takes before you hear something you did not expect. On most reels it never happens.

Where That Leaves a Script

Pick the length first and write to the word count. Open inside something already happening. Let one idea carry the whole spot and put the name in the action rather than stacked at the end. Save the biggest laugh for after the sell. A script that does those four things is already better than most of what runs in any market on a given morning, and what follows is a question of casting and mixing rather than rescue.