'Superscreen!' 'Who?' (AKA: The Worst Radio Ad in the World... Ever!) (1997)
There were three of us in the department - and I think station management gave me the job because I was the only one who couldn't drive, so they saved a bit of money by not having to cough up for a company car.
Thanks to some 'restructuring' we had to re-apply for our jobs, and I was told to apply for the so-called 'top job'.
It was particularly bloody horrible because it meant I was competing with the bloke who'd given me a job at Century Radio in the first place. But this was how things worked: I was told that if I didn't apply for the 'top job' it would show I wasn't 'fully committed to the company' and that I 'lacked ambition'. I'd also probably lose the job I had.
I shouldn't have applied for it. And not just because I was being forced to compete with my co-workers in a horrible, divisive manner - I shouldn't have applied for it because I knew I'd be crap at it.
I wasn't fully committed to the company and I did lack ambition: I'd been applying for jobs at local colleges and trying to get onto a Teacher Training course because I was sick of writing adverts for an endless stream of window companies and second hand car dealers.
I was 24 and I'd been working in local radio for about three and a half years - but I still didn't have a clue what I was doing. I think I was probably quite competent at writing straightforward, bog standard scripts, but I was useless at selling ideas to businesses or producing adverts with professional voiceovers.
I had zero confidence. I couldn't charm or cajole advertisers. I couldn't bullshit or assert any kind of authority with the sales team or senior management. Maybe they just wanted a doormat. I'd never had any proper training, I'd just picked up bits and pieces from people I'd worked with.
And as expected, I was completely fucking hopeless as a manager. I thought (probably correctly) that they appointed me knowing my boss would quit - and he did, immediately. As soon as he found out he wasn't keeping the management job, he walked. They wanted rid of him, so maybe the whole 'restructuring'/'apply for your own jobs' process was designed to do that.
To be fair, he wasn't great at being a manager, but he certainly made a better job of it than I ever did. For some reason his face didn't fit with senior management, so they got rid of him by promoting me. It's still a source of regret - I shouldn't have stabbed him in the back. It was the only time I ever did anything like that - and I still feel awful about it. We were all backed into a corner and ordered to fight against each other. I shouldn't have played that game.
My former boss left the company and set himself up as a freelance copywriter and was able to spirit away quite a bit of business - so our sales figures took a big hit immediately.
I tried to recruit a new writer from a station I used to work for but he turned it down, saying he'd heard that Century was a 'bloody nightmare' to work for. Lucky bastard.
I had to employ a trainee, which added to my workload and made everything more difficult. The sales reps didn't want adverts written by a trainee, so I had to write more and more and more. And they all started to sound the same and the sales reps complained about that too. I didn't cope. I was sinking. Quickly. And people cottoned on. Everybody knew I was as soft as shite.
That's probably why I got dragged into the world of 'Superscreen.'
Superscreen
was a little shop in Middlesbrough selling secondhand TVs and Video
Recorders. Nowadays that sort of place wouldn't be able to
afford the rates charged by regional radio stations like Century (now
re-branded as Heart or Smooth or whatever the fuck they're calling
it this week), but back in the 90s we worked with loads of small, local businesses.
The department had already had one go at writing scripts but the owner of Superscreen wasn't happy. He wanted more information in the advert, more prices, more special offers and he wanted something catchy. He'd heard other radio adverts using music and thought they were better than anything we'd come up with.
At that time, creative advertising types were trying to move away from making old fashioned advertising 'jingles' because they were seen as cheap and cheesy - and there was a push to sell 'Musical Identities' or 'sonic branding' to advertisers (exactly the same as 'jingles' but much more fucking expensive).
Most advertisers couldn't afford the four or five thousand pounds it would cost for a 'Musical Identity', so we used to look for library music tracks. We had racks and racks of compact discs - all filled with library music that we could use on adverts at no additional cost. Some really well known TV themes were on those library discs - things like 'Grange Hill', 'The Bill' and 'Match of the Day'. We thought it was a good way to give a smaller business a musical identity without having to pay silly money.
Anyway - the boss of Superscreen took the CD with the theme from 'Match of the Day' on it away with him and wrote his own ad. He turned up at our offices (with three of his employees) and asked to record his commercial. They'd been 'rehearsing all night' in their office so they were 'word perfect'. They didn't see why they should pay for us to write and record an advert when they could do a better job.
At this point, a wise and responsible Commercial Production Manager would have stepped in and explained - tactfully - that this was a bad idea.
Me? I let them make their own advert.
We spent a couple of hours in a recording studio. I sat behind the mixing desk with our Sound Engineer and tried to capture the magic. It seemed to take forever. The Sound Engineer and I couldn't look at each other - I don't think either of us knew whether to laugh or cry. I was too timid to give any direction or advice to the advertiser. They thought they were doing a brilliant job. I didn't even send them a bill for the studio time.
And this was the best take:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSOhaYcWJlc
The Advertiser (and his colleagues) left the studio full of confidence - they thought they'd really nailed it. I was in a state of mild panic. I knew the advert couldn't possibly go to air - but I decided to make it somebody else's decision.
The Century Radio programme controller listened to the advert, chuckled and then very seriously said:
'You must be fucking joking'.
And then it was up to me to explain all of this to the man from Superscreen. It's difficult to say what I was more scared of - having to tell the advertiser that his commercial 'wasn't good enough' or losing the business (which would have meant getting shouted at by an angry Century Radio Sales Rep and their manager).
I thought about quitting and running away - but in the end I phoned up some of our regular voice-overs and asked them to re-record the script. We re-made the advert (minus singing) but still using the 'Match of the Day' backing track and the final shout of 'FREE PARKING!!!!'
Century Radio had to pay all of the production costs because I was too scared to tell the people from Superscreen that we didn't want to use their voices.
I played the boss from Superscreen the re-make and he seemed happy enough - but also a bit confused as to why we didn't use the original. I waffled down the phone about complicated music rights, the 'fact' that we had to use equity voices on adverts and how we weren't really supposed to have anybody singing over a library music track... And he bought it. The re-make went to air.
And then I tried to forget about it.
A few years later (after I did eventually run away from local radio) I found out that tapes of the original Superscreen ad were being played to sales-people and copywriters as a way of showing what horrors can unfold when you let an advertiser write their own ad. It was also picked up by the Virgin Radio Breakfast show and played as the worst radio commercial ever. I was quite proud of that - I'd been 'in the room' when the 'worst' advert had been made. It was partly my fault that it had ever been made!
Some people seemed to think that the original version had gone to air and I really really wish it had. It would make for a better story. And to be honest, it wasn't all that much worse than some of the other ads we were making.
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