Pat Murphy
Hi and welcome to the MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who is shaping the world of advertising and production for the future and we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to Paul Burke, the most successful radio writer producer in the world, so he tells me! He’s won more awards for this than anyone in the business so many that he was presented with a radio advertising fellowship at the House of Lords. He loved advertising from the start and became a copywriter at YNR, then BNP DDB and back many years later to AMV BBDO.

In that time he won countless awards, not just for radio but for TV and print work as well. But it’s radio that we’re going to talk about today. It was always his favourite medium and he’ll explain why. He’s a good friend, lovely man and the best in the world at what he does. Paul, it’s great to have you here with us today on The Prodcast.

Paul Burke
A great honour to be here. Sounds like Steve Wright, ‘big fan of the show’, but I am. I really am.

Pat Murphy
Thank you very much. Welcome Now radio. Yes, why radio? It’s not exactly the sexy end of the business, is it?

Paul Burke
I think the reason I’ve always loved radio is it’s the least needy of all the mediums. It doesn’t cry, ‘look at me, look at me’ like TV print or digital. It entertains and informs you while you’re wallpapering the front room or performing open-heart surgery or driving a car. You can do something else, and it also stems from the fact that I’m an entirely useless human being.

I can write, and when I was a kid I used to play records in nightclubs. That’s it. And I mean I was okay, you know, average student at things like history and geography and maths, but the thing I was the worst in the class at was art. So I can’t be allowed near anything even remotely visual! So it was very fortunate that I got into a business that is, you know, principally visual – they used to let me do the stuff with no visual content whatsoever, because then then I was safe.I always loved it anyway – I would listen to Radio 1 as a kid and Capital Radio, but I really got to love it when I started writing ads for it.

Pat Murphy
How did you get into the business in the first place?

Paul Burke
Tthe only thing I was ever good at school was writing stories. And at school, before we were about to leave they used to come round from various professions. There’d be someone from the army, the police, the civil service. And someone came around from an advertiser and he seemed quite slick and quite nice, seemed quite old, probably not much older than we were, and we’d all heard of Saatchi and Saatchi because everybody had. And he said ‘you know, there’s lots of places like that’. So I got home and got what we used to call the Yellow Pages… advertising agencies. And he was right, there was loads!

First one in the book Abbott Mead Vickers. ‘Can I speak to Mr Abbott’? I suppose, yeah, it starts at A, doesn’t it? Abbott Mead Vickers? I’d never heard of David Abbott. I didn’t know who Mr Abbott was. And so I asked to speak to him. I mean, if I knew who David Abbott was…! If I’d have got further down the list, I’d have asked to speak to Leo Burnett. I didn’t know who these people were.

And I get in to see David Abbott, weirdly. To cut a long story short – they were looking for a runner.

Pat Murphy
We’ve all been there. We all started as a runner, didn’t we?

Paul Burke
Yeah, well, I mean, with no internet, every piece of advertising, every cassette or then CD or can of film or artwork for print work, had to be delivered, and I delivered them! And the moment I got there I just thought I’ve found my people. And they gave me a go and I liked it and I carried on liking it.

Pat Murphy
So you went from runner and you managed to climb up the slippery slope in Abbott Mead, was it? Did you go to somewhere else in between?

Paul Burke
Well, what happened was at Abbott Mead. Because I used to like writing and I don’t mean writing in a highfalutin way. By then I was in what they called the production department. We produced the ads, the artwork and the typography and the photographs for the newspapers and magazines, and I always got the task of when the reproduction hadn’t turned out very well, which it happened now and again I had to write the letter of complaint. And one day, this bottle of Sainsbury’s white wine. I don’t know what happened with the printing it was yellow. It looked like cat’s piss. So I just said ‘when people see this, they’ll wonder how we got the cat to sit on the bottle’.

And one of the copywriters just said ‘did you do this’? ‘You ever thought about being a writer’? And I said ‘oh no, no, I couldn’t do this’. It was a guy who was one of the greatest writers in this country, a producer called Richard Foster. And I said I couldn’t be a writer.

I didn’t really like English literature at school. I thought Shakespeare was boring and Chaucer and Dickens was a bit overwritten, wasn’t it? And he said, ‘yeah, me too’. I said what do you mean ‘me too’, you know, you’re one of the greatest copywriters. He said it’s a wholly different discipline. He said read columnists in the Sunday Times, in the Guardian, in the Spectator. It’s that rhythm, that style, that concision of thought and as I looked at it, I thought, ‘yeah, I could do this, I could do this, I’m sure I could’, and I must have had help from them.

Pat Murphy
Writing for audio, though, and let’s talk about it as audio rather than radio, because there are so many more channels that are audio specific these days, so I hope you don’t mind me calling it audio.

Paul Burke
Well, no, it’s like we say ‘I’ll tape that’, when you mean I’ll record it. Just an old-fashioned phrase no audio, yes Audio!

Pat Murphy
Writing for audio, though. Is it a skill that’s going out of fashion, or has gone out of fashion?

Paul Burke
No, it’s a skill that nobody ever had really! Not nobody, obviously. The reason you hear radio commercials certainly in the UK and I would guarantee in other countries who are listening to this too, that are terrible is the people who write them are writing radio commercials because they were good at drawing at school and you think ‘how’? And they were good at art? Of course they were.

But when they get to an agency and they always give radio to the juniors because not so much money is at stake. They get a radio brief. They’ve got to write something, create something with no visual content whatsoever, something they weren’t trained to do. They don’t want to do it, they’re not very good at it and I sort of don’t blame them! That’s not what they trained for, it’s a wholly different thing.

But because I was the opposite – useless at anything visual, but I did like to write, I did enjoy doing radio. What happened originally – I was the runner and the production assistant at AMV and one of them said to me ‘look, if you want to be a writer, you really should start again somewhere else;. Not start again, but move somewhere else, because then you’re known from day one as a writer rather than the delivery boy who takes the ads to Fleet Street. So I did.

I went to Y&R and I always did bits of radio because I used to like it. I mean, the thrill for me with radio, and still is and always will be, is you can be watching a program on Netflix or on BBC or whatever, and there’s someone in it and you think, ‘oh, she’s good, the one who plays the daughter, she’s really good’. And that’s on Tuesday and on Friday. There she is in front of you reading out something you’ve written. And I think it’s the advertising gets to being a branch of entertainment and showbiz.

And when I was at BNP DDB I’d only just started. When I think of that creative department in the 1990s, it was one of the best creative departments that ever existed and I’m not being falsely modest. These people were much better than me, they really were. If I name them, you had Frank Budgin, Peter Gatley, John Webster, Tony Davidson, Kim Packworth, Tim Riley, Nick Gill, Joe Wendley. I mean just endless brilliant people. And I’ve probably left a few out. Those are just the ones that came to mind and I thought, not that I’m terrible compared with them, but I’m never going to be, probably never going to be as good as them at TV and print and I’ve always think it’s better ‘Don’t try to be the best, be the only’. And I thought if I can do the radio, I can probably do radio better than any of them.

And when this brief came in for the Guardian and they wanted a brand new commercial every single day. It was a fax machine the story would come over and they’d go ‘we want to concentrate on this’. And I’d read the story off the fax machine in the morning, write an ad, sort of lunchtime, and at four o’clock I had to go and record it with our dear old friend Nick Angel down at Angel Sound. To get on the air the following morning. Again, it couldn’t be emailed it, you know you’d have to finish it and the runner from angel sound have to run it around to the radio stations. They brought a producer in, an external producer called Mandy Wheeler, and Mandy Wheeler changed my life.

Pat Murphy
Oh, I remember Mandy!

Paul Burke
Mandy wheeler! Obsessed with radio and almost like a disease, I caught that obsession off her and I went from being just another creative and not as good as my colleagues, to someone that specialised in this and got known for that.

And also because I’ve got the attention span of a gnat. With radio you can complete a complete piece of creative work in an hour and you’ve been on TV shoots and I have, you know, great, but they half go on, don’t they? A lot more people around!

Pat Murphy
You mentioned Saatchi earlier on, and that was my first ad agency. And I was in the TV department and they used to give the radio ads to the most junior people in the TV department. So I was a production assistant in the TV department and I got to cut my teeth on radio that way. And I was thinking at the time how come it doesn’t have more gravitas, why don’t people specialise in producing radio ads? And I think I was the very first Head of Radio Production at Saatchi. At that time I specifically asked to be that person in that job and they gave it to me and I was so proud of it.

Paul Burke
Yeah, you were the only. But again, you liked it yourself, didn’t you?

Pat Murphy
I loved it. It was the best thing in the universe.

Paul Burke
We both do. I loved it. You liked it as a kid, long before you ever did ads on it, of course. I mean, I remember getting my first transistor radio as I plugged that battery in when I was about 10, little transistor I plugged into that lifelong love that I know you did. Nothing’s changed – the only thing that’s different is creative departments used to be a lot more diverse and a lot more random and people would just fetch up there and very often there were good writers who really wanted to be novelists or playwrights so they really could write radio. I think it was given more time, it was taken more seriously. It’s just sort of banged out now, which is a shame, a real shame.

Pat Murphy
And over the years, both you and I have worked with countless celebrities, right?

Paul Burke
Oh, my word yeah!

Pat Murphy
So this is our opportunity to, as there’s no one listening to this podcast, Paul.

Paul Burke
Nobody, nobody at all!

Pat Murphy
We can be totally naughty and have a little bit of a chit-chat about the people who we worked with, that we loved, and also with the ones we didn’t love I mean who? Who are the people that you absolutely loved working with uh on the from a celebrity perspective?

Paul Burke
I always argue with nick angel about who gave him his first voiceover. I think it was me, it was Stephen Fry! I just think he turned up in life or show business, sort of ready-made and ready to go, and just never fluffed. And I remember not that long ago, because we gave him his first voiceover like 30 years ago. More than that! Because Stephen Fry, although he is older now he’s 65, but even when he was 30, although he looked young, he had the bearing of an older man and it was the best of both worlds. You were young and contemporary but still had that gravitas.

And I remember, not that long ago, we had this ad and it was supposed to be 30 seconds and the client kept adding all this crap in it and no matter how fast you went, it was 36 seconds. You know sometimes if it’s 31 or 32, you can nip a breath here and speed it up slightly. But this was and he goes ‘I tell you what you could do’. And he went ‘blah, blah, blah, blah, blah’ and we just went… I’m supposed to be the writer here! But he just went ‘should we try this’? And? And he did it 29.9. It didn’t even sound hurried, he was excellent!

They’re all alright.

Pat Murphy
I don’t know if anybody has never turned up to one of your sessions I remember I had one session where somebody didn’t turn up and I rang them up and they were still in bed and they said ‘oh, it’s all right, I’m not getting, I can’t turn up today, I’m a bit tired. Find someone else’.

Shall I tell you who it was it was. I don’t know if you remember the disc jockey, Nina Ferretto and I think we pulled in Jackie Brambles as a kind of replacement at the time.

Paul Burke
Oh, I liked her. I forgot about her!

Pat Murphy
She was great. She was fantastic. And then you know many others, the people I like most. There was Hugh Laurie, who I used to often sit in the kind of you know the reception areas chatting away to Hugh Laurie before he became famous on the house. Joanna Lumley always delightful. Simon Cadell was just a brilliant character.

Paul Burke
Just lovely! Hugh Laurie, what he used to do, because he’s done this with me a few times. He’d do it and then he’d go. He’d really really not in any way unpleasant to anyone else, but be really hard on himself. He’d go ‘oh god, no, I could do that better than that. It’s rubbish. I could do that better than that’. And we go ‘okay, Hugh, just do it how you want it to be’ and he’ll go. He does it again and he goes. ‘Yeah, that’s great’. And you think it’s exactly the same as the last one!

And there was an occasion with him because we used to do the Alliance and Leicester with him and Stephen and Hugh, I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you. You’ve done more airtime than I have. He just couldn’t say the word ‘mortgage’, something he’d said a million times. The more he tried the worse it got, and in the end we just said ‘look, Hugh, it doesn’t matter, just go outside in the fresh air for 10 minutes, come back, you’ll be fine’, and he was, but I think it’s a symptom of how much he drove himself. This was somebody who was in the boat race for Cambridge. How dedicated and determined! People always forget that when they see funny people, how hard they worked to get there.

And anyone who ever went to Oxford or Cambridge for a start. Just that alone. You’ve worked really, really hard to do that.

Pat Murphy
And the thing is, they come in and they make it look really easy. I know you think some of those great voiceovers and great acting talent make it look so simple. I remember thinking, ‘oh, I could do that’. But it was very, very hard.

Paul Burke
But the other thing – what I hate in life is the mad, crazy, busy people, absolutely stacked, and what they’re saying in effect is ‘you’re lucky to be seeing me’ and those people that just cruise in, they can be so busy, but they find the time and while you’ve got them for that hour, they’re yours!

Pat Murphy
Not always. That wasn’t always the case! I remember Martin Jarvis. Remember Martin Jarvis? He had his Rolls Royce parked outside on the curb ticking over while he walked in to do the voiceover. He walked. I thought, ‘okay, right, let’s see how this goes’. He literally came in and said ‘let’s get on with this. I’ve got my car waiting for me outside’ and he went into the studio, did it in one take. He said ‘thanks a lot, see you.’ One take.

One take, it was like three seconds gone.

Paul Burke
Unbelievable. Properly old school.

I had a similar thing with um. I had to use David Frost for something for The Times, again not that long ago, and the agent phoned up goes ‘right, david’s um, he’s staying at the Dorchester I think it’s Dorchester, so we need you down there with the recording equipment. We’ve got half an hour or something. Blah, blah, blah’. And I just heard myself said ‘no, no, that’s not going to work for us.’ He said what do you mean? And I said if it’s in a hotel, the sound isn’t going to be so good. It’s going to take a while to set up. I said what we’ll do is I promise you it will work out quicker. We’ll send a car to The Dorchester. Just whizz him around to Soho. He can do it. We can whiz him around to solo. Uh, he can do it. We can have the car waiting outside. That’s what reminded me and um, then he can go back. And she reluctantly agreed and of course it worked fine. You know that you’ve got so much more control. He’s in the studio. It was. It was only ‘Today in the Sunday Times. Blah, blah, blah’. He did a couple of takes and off he went. And on the way he said to me um, ‘are you the one that stood up to my agent’? And I said, yeah, he goes, good for you, just walked out,

Again, I don’t know how it is in other countries. I will only deal with actors and actresses who have proper voice agents, because other agents, theatrical agents, can be very difficult.

They think they think you’re pretending! We have almost sort of set rates, give or take, and if they’re with a voice agent, they know that the agent knows that that’s fine. Whereas other agents will go. They think you’re trying to have them over on the money and you’re not. And they know ‘can you get over a contract’? And we’ve always done any, not literally on a handshake, but I’ve never stitched anyone up and as far as I know, no one’s ever stitched me up. It’s a small business! You’re not going to do that, but they think you are. So I try not to deal with that kind of agent. But no, it is show business!

Pat Murphy
What we’re going to do now, Paul, is we’re going to take a quick ad break. It’s the first time we’ve ever had an opportunity to do an ad break in the middle of our podcast.  So this is our chance to play two or three ads that you really, really love. What have we got lined up?

Paul Burke
The first one, the COI thing. I was at this radio conference and this woman stood up. I think her name was Sarah Martin from McCann’s and she was very nice. I’d given my talk and she was giving hers.

Pat Murphy
She was the head of production at McCann’s at that time wasn’t she? Very nice lady!

Paul Burke
Very, very nice. And I feel bad about doing this, but I still did it. She drew this triangle on the whiteboard and in each corner of the triangle she put on one corner each “good, fast, good, quick, cheap. You can have out of three, but you can’t have all three”. And she gave a talk about this and then, as she went off the stage, I said ‘excuse me, I know I’ve had my turn, but can I come back’? And I went back up on the stage and I said ‘look, I’m so sorry, but very nice talk.  But that bit she said about good, it’s not true!’ I said you know, ‘obviously it can’t be. It’s not always good and that’s a different issue. It can’t be cheap if you’ve got five voices and a 12-piece orchestra, and sometimes it’s not quick because it takes a lot of putting together. But things can be good, quick and cheap. They should be good, quick and cheap wherever possible and that’s what you should aim for. And to say that they can’t be it’s nonsense’. And I think this ad, which only has one voice and I know for a fact only took one hour to make, is good and quick and cheap!

<<< THREE AUDIO ADS >>>

Pat Murphy
There are those three ads the COI, Fire Ants and Met Police. Paul, do you want to say anything about those three we just played?

Paul Burke
Yeah weirdly, the Fire Ants one is also good. I wasn’t there. It was made years ago in America, so I can’t say for certain. It’s certainly good. I doubt it was expensive. It was just one bloke. I imagine it was made very quickly, those sort of things just the way it’s written.

Usually I like to have a little piece of comedy or drama, but sometimes just one person saying that was really powerful. And if you’d seen that written in a newspaper you could read it. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as good! There’s just something about his voice. He’s so funny and so horrible, but he’s right. And there’s also an awful lot of product stuff put in there. He’s told you exactly how to use it. He’s told you the name time and time again. Yeah, but if you just put some mischief in it, a little bit of mischief, people will remember it forever, and I really do.

The Met Police I remember doing this.

Pat Murphy
That was one of yours, was it?

Paul Burke
Well, yes and no. It was a guy called Michael Jones, who’s still at Abbott Mead, who was absolutely delightful, and he had this idea and we had to record it the day after Christmas (not the day after, the day we got back from Christmas – it was like 5th of January or something) and there was nobody around to approve it and there was usually quite a big approval process. But they were desperate to get some ads on these, because I’ve got this idea and I worked with him on it and I think well, you know, you’ve got to boast sometimes I cast that really well and it just works really well as a piece of radio. You’ve got a real person, an imaginary person, then someone who sounds like a copper at the end. I just always like that and D&AD liked it too.

Pat Murphy
Now do me a favour, explain a little bit about the difference between great headlines and great copy. I mean, we’ve got loads of great examples of headlines like Audi – Vorsprung Durch Technik and Just Do It for Nike. What about great copy?

Paul Burke
Well, they’re not really headlines, they’re end lines, they’re baselines. Again, they’re very different skills, and great headlines. It’s that ability to distil a whole strategy into a few words that say what you want to say and grab people’s attention.

I mean, there’s one I put in there which I can explain. It was for a furniture shop called and you could have run it for absolutely anything. They were having their January sale. It was called Texas Home Care, and instead of saying half price or 50% off, which you’d normally say, it just says pay half now and nothing later. The best headlines just give you half a second and that’s all it is for you to finish off and get it yourself.

A lot of good headlines or just a lot of good copy. I remember doing something and it was for, I think it was Volkswagen, and I’d put the Volkswagen Polo ‘at £8,262 or – whatever it was – you can’t afford not to’. And the creative director said ‘just turn it into a question 8,000, can you afford not to’ ? And it just gives you the chance to finish it off and make up your mind. Don’t tell people, just suggest to them. It is the art of persuasion.

There’s another brilliant one in there – it shows a German police car, it’s a Porsche, and it just says ‘in Germany there are no getaway cars’. All you’re saying is this car is really fast. But that’s a great way of putting it. And you just have to think of original ways to say… because you’re always saying either this thing is cheap, like that 50% off one, this car is fast,  but copy is a wholly different thing.

When I started writing books you tend to just distil it down. We write in short paragraphs. If anyone reads my books, they’ll have short chapters. Because I remember reading a book there’s a few of them Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin, and I was on a shoot bored, like I always was, but the chapters were quite short. They weren’t short stories, they were all part of one continuous book. But I just thought, ‘oh, I’ll just read another one, I’ll just read another one, I’ll just read another one. I’m enjoying this, just read another one’. Before you know it, I’d finished the book. And we’ve all been wading through books and you think –  have a quick look, how long is this chapter? I can’t be bothered with this! But again, copywriting, good copywriters I remember Jeremy Clarkson saying he always wanted to be a copywriter because a good one is really, really skilled.

You have to make it easy, but don’t dumb it down, and I live by the phrase ‘easy reading, hard writing’.  I would work quite hard to make my writing not dumbed down but, quite easy to. And one thing should go on to another. Uh, the paragraphs are quite short, so you take them. I hate the phrase bite-sized chunks, but you know, dumbed down, but quite easy to. And one thing should go on to another. The paragraphs are quite short, so you take them. I hate the phrase bite-sized chunks, but you know what I mean.

It reminds me of when I was in America recording Budweiser in New York and they said ‘you guys hungry, do you want a sandwich’? I said, ‘oh, yeah’, I was a bit hungry, and this sandwich came in from someone like Katz’s Deli and it was so big it was the size of a small child.

Pat Murphy
They always are.

Paul Burke
And I didn’t know how to pick it up and suddenly I wasn’t hungry, I didn’t want it and I think that’s a good lesson with writing. Don’t put massive chunks of stuff on the page. I mean again, I live by new thought, new paragraph. Don’t put massive chunks of stuff on the page. Again, I live by new thought, new paragraph. But just advertising copy is often you’ll have a paragraph in two words and usually make it a complete story, round it off, usually somehow refer back to your original thought and keep that thought going through it.

Pat Murphy
I remember you saying that copywriting, for radio specifically, is the purest form of writing and production.

Paul Burke
Yeah.

Pat Murphy
And it’s also the closest advertiser gets to showbiz. Even now, Do you have to think and write differently? I mean, where do you start? You’ve got a blank sheet of paper right in front of you. Where do you start?

Paul Burke
The first thing I always do with writing anything is, if you said, write me a commercial, write me anything. I could sit here for the rest of my life. I won’t come up with anything. I just go for a walk for 10 or 15 minutes, or sometimes, if you’re stuck, it’s bizarre. You think what’s happened? Where’s this magic come from? There’s always some connection between walking and creativity. So the first thing I’ll do is go for a walk.

The way I always start with radio is, let’s just say, it’s got two people in it, a man and a woman. The first thing I do is give those characters names. You see scripts, I’ve seen them all the time. I’ll probably see one before the end of the week that’s been given to me to produce and the. The characters are called MVO and FVO. Sometimes they’re called MVO2. Can you imagine a book or a play where all the characters are called MVO? So you just think right, I’m, I’m going to call the bloke Michael and the girl Helen.

Immediately you’ve got an idea of what they sort of look like, how old they are and they oh. This sounds very pretentious, but it’s true. They start to talk because that’s the sort of thing Michael would say. Someone called Helen might say that, whereas someone called MVO, there’s nothing to distinguish him from MVO2, really. So give them names, give them characters.

Nothing exists on radio until you write it, and certain sounds don’t exist in real life. I had this thing where somebody said it was for some gift shop. We hear the sound of a card this is a birthday card. The sound of a birthday card dropping into the basket. What noise does that make then? It’s practically silent and sometimes you don’t know unless you say what the thing is, nobody’s going to know. You have to be very careful with pouring drinks, because it sounds like someone having a wee in the corner unless you say would you like a drink? Certain things I think it’s frying bacon, fire and heavy rain all sound exactly the same!

The questions I always put into these things: it has to answer four questions. Who are these people? Where are they? What are they doing? How do we know? Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? How do we know?

And it can usually just be one thing. There’s a man talking to a child, but you don’t know why he’s talking to a child. If the child just says ‘Dad’, oh, immediately you know who they are and just little sound effects can place them somewhere and it doesn’t usually take much to fix it.

On television the voice is just there really to support the visuals very often, but take those visuals away and the voice is all you’ve got!

Pat Murphy
Do you believe in jingles?

Paul Burke
I do, but even by the time I started they weren’t really a thing anymore. I mean, there’s loads in America and and certainly in this country we were brought up on them, but I certainly believe in them.

Pat Murphy
And they’re incredibly memorable. Get it right, they’re incredibly memorable. And they stick in your head for years and years and years.

Paul Burke
A Finger of Fudge is just enough? You and I could sing a few British ones, but they won’t mean much to anyone outside of this place, but yes.

Pat Murphy
A great case, example of one right now is webuyanycar.com, right.
So they’ve got that jingle and it’s incredibly catchy. Even my kids sing it.

Paul Burke
Yeah. With cars. Years ago, when computers were quite new, they had a thing called Computer Car and they just. I can remember the jingle now. It was based in Wembley and it was called 9038383, ring 903. I’m doing it now. This is 40, 50 years ago yeah and then the Evening Standard Classified 388 double six, double four, or something like that you still remember it.

Pat Murphy
You see, you still remember it.

Paul Burke
Yeah, I remembered it. So on april falls Day, I put Our Teacher’s House up for sale! Took out an ad and I nearly got expelled for that one. But yeah, that feeds into advertising.

If advertising was a person, I can’t thank that person enough. Well, I suppose it’s David Abbott really. Can’t thank him enough for giving me a life that I otherwise wouldn’t have had, meeting all these famous people.

Pat Murphy
Tell me if I’m right or wrong. I’m not hearing many great ads on the radio these days. I remember great ads in the past, but not these days. What’s going wrong? What’s happened in the industry because we’re not hearing so many great ads?

Paul Burke
Well, I think it’s part of a broader problem that we’re not seeing many great ads either. I know I’m bound to say this, and so are you, but it doesn’t make it any less true. When we started, advertising was really cool. And if you were a creative person, say, there was a place in the world down the road called ‘Creative School’ the top graduates, the star pupils from Creative School would want to work in advertising, but they sort of don’t anymore. There are other things open to them, making short films, doing blogs, doing podcasts, all the things that didn’t exist. So we’re not attracting the cream of the crop. And, believe me, I know I’ve mentored in advertising colleges. And of course there are exceptions because there’s some brilliant kids, but generally speaking it’s a bit bland. And again with stiff competition. This is the most arrogant and self-regarding thing I’m going to say.

But there used to be us and them, and we were actors, writers, producers, directors, photographers, the creative Johnnies. Then there was them and they worked in corporate finance and, well, they were solicitors. They lived out in the suburbs and they played golf. This is a horrible generalization, but I think you get my point. We lived in our world, they lived lived in theirs. We’re all quite happy.

Then one day they decided they wanted to be the cool kids and so they came into not just our business but to comedy, to television, and they just don’t have that ‘thing’. I’m not even sure I’ve got it, and if I have I can’t prove it. That thing, that recognition of a good idea, that facility with words or with pictures. And then they hire people who are like them and then things are a bit, a bit more prim and censorious and or people are frightened of offending people or and everyone must have their, and therefore you end up with ads that maybe nobody really likes. It was nobody’s first choice. It’s become a bit more like that.

Pat Murphy
What is the future now of radio and radio advertising? You look at the numbers, the audiences, and they’re still up there! So how does a client get better work? Because if you spend all that money on the media and you’re not investing well in the production, it’s kind of wasting your money?

Paul Burke
It is wasting your money and unfortunately, this is exacerbated by what the radio stations do, and I know this from experience in the UK. But whatever country you’re in, listen to this, because it’s true! If the radio station comes to you and says, which they do, ‘hey, we’ll do your creative and production work for nothing’, just think to yourself… everything you need to know is in that sentence! They might as well have said ‘we place absolutely no value on creativity or production’. Also, I would suggest that they don’t do it for nothing. Perhaps they bump up the airtime costs to cover their production costs? But even if they don’t, just say to them ‘that’s very kind of you, thank you for your offer. However, we do have our own creative and production facilities. Could you please tot up exactly how much you would have spent on this campaign? Tot it up for us, please, and deduct it from our airtime bill’. And they’ll have to do it, because if they don’t you’re gonna want to know why.

In my experience, they don’t always use the best artists. I remember when I was doing stuff for a commercial radio station and I wasn’t using hugely expensive people, just run-of-the-mill voiceovers that you and I would use at the time and they said, ‘oh no, we don’t deal with them. Here’s our list of agencies’, and I’ve worked for years and I know everyone. I’ve never heard of these agencies, never heard of the people on them! So I again I would suggest that they were, perhaps not the best people for the job and maybe they can get them cheaper and pay them less in usage. Again, it’s all maybe, maybe, maybe. But from what I’ve seen with my own eyes in that regard and then what I then hear on the radio, I would link those two things together.

You know, like when you’re booking a flight with Ryanair or a budget airline, you ‘just want to go, just the flight, please. None of your nonsense, none of your extras, none of this. That, just the flight’. And if you can do that, that’s very wise, you’ll get a very good deal. Same with radio stations yeah,’ just the airtime. Yeah, thank you, just the airtime. No, don’t do anything else, just the airtime’ and make your own arrangements!

Pat Murphy
Have you got any other top tips for clients who are thinking about doing a radio campaign?

Paul Burke
Well, this is for everyone really. creatives, anyone. The first thing I do, particularly if I’ve met somebody before an actor. The first thing I’ll say is just make some chit chat. It’ll be about five or ten minutes, so well spent. You just say things like um, yeah, where’d you live? Uh, and if it’s in london, I’ll know it and I’ll know something about it. And then you say something like ‘oh, I really liked you in that programme’, yeah, and she’ll tell you about that programme and you’re in that. And then when she sits down never give them any directions before they start.

If you’ve done your casting properly, they should be pretty good anyway. And obviously there’ll be a few things. It might be a bit long, a bit short. You want it set in a different way, so just let them do that and then get what you want and say by take seven, ‘yeah, that’s it, perfect, that’s what we want. Look, before you go, just do it the way you think it ought to be. You know, you know what we’re doing. Just, if there’s anything that we haven’t…, it might be exactly the same, we don’t care. Might be completely different, we don’t care. Just do the one that’s in your head. If we, we’re not here, we’re not listening’, and nine times out of ten their one will be better than yours. And even if they fluff at the end, just because you gave them the freedom and you’ve been nice to them, you should always do that!

Always go to good studios. The cheapest studios don’t necessarily work out to be the cheapest in the end, because the more expensive studios have really good kit and really good engineers and they’ll do it in two hours, where the um the cheaper one would have taken three. Cos they do this day in, day out! They do it far more than you do. So you don’t want one who just pressed the buttons, and always watch the back of the engineer’s head. If it nods almost imperceptibly, you know that he thinks it’s the right take. If he’s a good engineer, he’ll suggest it anyway.

I had to go to <<REDACTED>> to record the <<REDACTED>> and I just remember, I remember a lot about it, but I actually signed an NDR. I’m not allowed to talk about it. Not that anything happened, but I suppose they have to protect against me going on a podcast and talking about it. Nothing happened. They were very nice, but I just remember saying to them ‘I can make one sentence mean five different things’.

And <<REDACTED>> said ‘what do you mean’? And I said I didn’t steal your car, I go. I didn’t steal your car, I didn’t steal your car, I didn’t steal your car, I didn’t steal your car. And completely different meaning in each thing, and so the intonation has to be right because it’s music.

But then I think that comes from, you know when they say blind people have really really sensitive hearing. I think I’m much more sensitive to those things. Not that I’m blind, but I’m not very good visually, and so it’s very important to me to get it right, and any client, any creative, any person can do all those things.

Pat Murphy
So, Paul, look, we’re coming close to the end now.I could sit here and chat to you for hours talking about radio, which is my favourite passion, and we’ve done that many, many times over the years now! But we do have one final question which we always ask our guests since it’s always the highlight of our podcast. What’s your favourite ad of all time?

Paul Burke
Of all time? There’s an ad, it’s old. It’s an American ad for Chevys. And if you think of the things I said about who are these people? What are they doing? Where are they? How do we know? It answers all those in an instant. It’s a son taking his mum out for Mother’s Day. So the first thing he says is ‘well, mum’, I thought we’d go. So you immediately know, and there’s an awful lot of product information in there, but you don’t mind, because it’s so skillfully weaved into a credible scenario. The acting is brilliant, the effects are brilliant. It just makes you think and this is so obvious it shouldn’t need saying. It’s so obvious it’s almost a secret. But if you do good advertising, it’s assumed that if you have good taste in advertising, whatever is your selling is going to be good as well! So I’m assuming this restaurant that’s advertised many, many years ago in America called Chevy’s is fantastic, because, judging by the advertising, I’d book a table there tomorrow.

Pat Murphy
Brilliant stuff. We’re going to post it up on our website, theprodcast.com, and people can listen to it right there. Paul, look, it’s been fantastic chatting to you for the last 30-odd minutes.

Paul Burke
Absolute joy to see you Always was, and let’s catch up when you’re a bit closer to where I am now.

Pat Murphy
Thanks, mate. See you soon.

Today we talked to Paul Burke, the most successful radio writer and producer in the world. He’s won more awards for this than anyone else in the business. To find out more about the MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com, where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes.

If you’d like to feature on The Proddcast or have any comments, questions or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com. I’m Pat Murphy, ceo of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, of which all the links in the notes for this episode will be there. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks again to Paul, my team at MCA and to my production team at what Goes On Media. Thanks for listening. See you next time.