How to Make a Radio Commercial: The Seven Steps From Idea to Air

Four things have to exist before a radio commercial can go on the air: a script that fits the clock, a recorded performance, a mix that meets the station's technical spec, and a traffic instruction telling the station when to play it. Advertisers making their first spot almost always start with the second item and work outward, booking a voice before anyone has settled what the ad is actually about, and the cost of that order shows up two weeks later as a rewrite, a second recording session and a schedule that starts late.

The Part That Happens Before Anyone Records

Nielsen has reported for years in its Audio Today series that broadcast radio still reaches the large majority of American adults every week, and the character of that audience is what decides how a commercial has to be built. Almost nobody sits down to listen. They are driving, working, cooking, and the ad arrives in the middle of something else, once, with no picture and no way to scroll back. A spot written for a reader who can reread a sentence will fail in that environment no matter how good the voice is.

So the first work is subtraction. Pick one claim. A thirty-second commercial can plant one idea in a distracted listener and repeat one name, and an advertiser who insists on three services, two locations and a seasonal promotion has bought thirty seconds of noise. Write down, in a single sentence, the thing a listener should still know an hour later. Then write down who that listener is, what they are doing while they hear it, what you want them to do next, and any legal or disclaimer language that has to be included. That page takes fifteen minutes and it governs every decision after it.

Copy That Survives Being Spoken

A conversational commercial read runs near a hundred and fifty words a minute, which puts a fifteen-second spot at roughly forty words, a thirty at seventy-five, and a sixty at a hundred and fifty-five. Those are ceilings rather than targets. Copy written right up against the limit forces the talent to rush, and a rushed read sounds like a man reading, which is the one impression an ad cannot afford. Leave room for a pause, because the pause is often the part that sells.

Write in spoken syntax. Short clauses, one thought per sentence, no stacked subordinate phrases, numbers written the way a person says them rather than the way they appear on a page. Put the situation first and the brand second, because a listener who has not yet been given a reason to care will not hold a company name. Repeat the name at least twice, put the phone number at the very end, and say it twice if you use one at all. Read the whole thing aloud against a stopwatch before anybody is booked, and cut until it fits with air to spare. Our library of radio ad script examples shows the same discipline applied across a dozen categories.

Thirty Seconds in a Tire Shop

Structure is easier to see than to describe, so here is an original :30 written for a fictional tire shop, with the performance notes in brackets.

“THE INTERNET IS NOT IN THE CAR”, :30 radio, fictional client, one voice plus announcer.

SFX: rain on a windshield, a wiper dragging on a dry pass.
WOMAN [tight, doing arithmetic out loud, not upset yet]: The light came on in August. It is October.
SFX: the wiper again, worse.
WOMAN: The internet said it was probably nothing.
SFX: one unhappy thump from somewhere under the floor.
WOMAN [quieter, a full beat later]: The internet is not in the car.
ANNOUNCER [dry, unhurried, no smile in it]: Delp Tire in Chalfont. We look at it today, we tell you what it is, and we tell you what it is not.
SFX: rain stops. A door chime.
ANNOUNCER: Delp Tire. Two one five, five five five, oh two two eight.

Seventy-one words. One idea, which is that the shop will give a straight answer today. The comedy is carrying the sales argument rather than sitting next to it, and the announcer never signals that a joke happened. That restraint is a direction note, not a writing note, and it is the sort of thing that gets lost between a script and a booth when nobody is running the session. The mechanics behind building a spot this way are laid out in how to write a funny commercial script.

The Booth, the Director and the Takes

Buy a schedule and most stations will offer to produce the spot at no charge, which in practice means the afternoon announcer reads your copy over a library music cue between his own shifts. It is free and it is fast, and it sounds exactly like the other local commercials recorded that week by the same person in the same room. Advertisers who take the free production are buying a voice their audience has already trained itself to ignore.

Casting properly means casting against this script rather than against a general idea of a radio voice. Direct in situations instead of adjectives, because warm and friendly describes a result while telling the performer he is saying this to one neighbor across a fence describes an action. Change one variable per take, slower or quieter or less certain, never all at once, or you will not know which adjustment produced the take you liked. Record two clean passes of the business name and the phone number after the performance is done and the voice has settled. The full treatment of casting and use fees sits in our guide to the voice over commercial.

Music, Silence and the Numbers Engineering Cares About

Music has to be licensed for broadcast advertising, which rules out a commercial record unless you have bought a sync license for it, and rules in production libraries and original composition. Keep the bed under the voice and duck it hard on every line, because a listener in a car with road noise loses consonants first and music is what buries them. Silence belongs in the toolkit as well. A half second of nothing before the phone number does more for recall than another layer of sound design.

Deliver to the station's written spec and ask for it rather than guessing. Most stations want a WAV file at 44.1 kHz or a high bitrate MP3, timed slightly under the full length so a :30 lands near twenty-nine and a half seconds, with peaks kept below full scale and a little headroom left in the master. Stations run their own broadcast processing on everything they air, and a mix that has already been squashed flat in an attempt to sound loud comes out the other side distorted.

What the Station Needs From You

The last step is administrative and it is where first-time advertisers lose a week. Traffic departments need the audio file, a spot title, the start and end dates, and rotation instructions if more than one version is running. Larger groups also ask for an Ad-ID code, the industry's standard commercial identifier. Send everything at least two business days before the first air date, and confirm receipt with a person rather than assuming an email arrived, because a spot that misses the traffic deadline does not run and the airtime is still billed.

The Bill and the Calendar

Production and airtime are separate purchases and they behave differently. Airtime is sold by the station against ratings and demand, so it moves with the calendar. Production is a fixed piece of work, and the market for it runs from free station reads through freelance producers in the hundreds to agency creative in the thousands, with the price largely tracking how much of the script, casting and direction somebody else is carrying. Our radio commercial production cost guide breaks the ranges down line by line.

We publish flat prices instead of quoting: $199 for fifteen seconds, $249 for thirty and $399 for sixty, written, cast, directed, mixed and delivered broadcast ready, most jobs in a day, and the finished file belongs to the business that paid for it with no term and no renewal. The service is described in full on our radio advertising production page.

Where That Leaves You

Making a radio commercial is seven steps in a fixed order: decide the single idea, write it to the clock, cast against the script, direct the session, mix for a car rather than for headphones, deliver to spec, and get it to traffic early. Each step is cheap on its own. What gets expensive is doing them out of order, and the most common version of that mistake is booking a voice on Monday for a script nobody has finished arguing about.