Before We Write Your Radio Ad - Let’s Talk About Your Business

Every great radio ad starts with a conversation. Not about music beds or voice styles or ad lengths — but about you. Your business, your customers, and the one thing you most want people to know.

In the advertising industry, that conversation gets captured in something called a creative brief. Agencies use them to align everyone before a single word of script is written. They can run to many pages inside a big agency — but the best ones are actually very simple.

Here's what a good brief looks like, using a fictional furniture retailer as an example. As you read through it, think about how you'd answer each section for your own business.

Who Is the Client and What's the Campaign? Coastal Furniture is a regional Queensland furniture retailer running an End of Financial Year clearance sale. They need radio advertising that drives people into their stores before the sale ends.

Simple enough. But notice how much is already decided before the creative work begins: the client, the goal, the medium, and the timing.

What Are We Trying to Achieve? For Coastal Furniture, the objective is clear: get people into the store this weekend. Not next month. Not eventually. This weekend.

That clarity matters enormously. A radio ad trying to build longterm brand awareness sounds completely different from one trying to drive foot traffic on Saturday morning. Knowing which one you need shapes every creative decision that follows.

Who Are We Talking To? Coastal Furniture's audience is homeowners and families aged 30 to 55, living in regional Queensland. They care about value but they also care about style — they don't want to feel like they're buying cheap furniture, they want to feel like they got a great deal on good furniture.

Critically, they respond to friendly and down-to-earth communication. They don't want to be talked at by a polished announcer voice. They want to feel like a mate is tipping them off about something good.

Knowing this, the creative direction writes itself: warm, energetic, local, authentic. Not corporate. Not overproduced.

What's the One Thing We Need to Say? This is the most important question in any brief — and the hardest one for business owners to answer, because there's always more than one thing you want to say.

For Coastal Furniture, the answer is: this is their biggest clearance of the year, and the best deals won't last.

One idea. Everything else supports it or gets cut.

Why Should People Believe It? A claim without proof is just noise. For Coastal Furniture, the reasons to believe are: hundreds of items reduced, a local store with real staff, and a genuine limited-time event. These aren't just words — they're the details that make the claim feel credible.

What Has to Be in the Ad? Every campaign has mandatory elements — the non-negotiables that must appear regardless of the creative direction. For Coastal Furniture: the brand name, the words "End of Financial Year Clearance," the sale end date, and the store location or website.

Everything else is creative territory.

What Does Success Look Like? For Coastal Furniture, success means more people through the door on the weekend, more sales during the campaign period, and people remembering the brand afterwards. These are the measures that tell us whether the advertising worked.

Now — Your Turn

You don't need to fill out a formal brief to work with Brand New Day. But the more you can tell us about these things, the better the advertising we can create together:

What's the campaign about, and when does it run?

What do you want people to do after they hear the ad?

Who are you trying to reach — and what matters to them?

What's the one thing you most want them to know?

Why should they believe you?

What absolutely has to be in the ad? That's it. Six questions. The answers don't need to be long — a sentence or two for each is enough to get started. Inside agencies, the very best briefs are sometimes just one sentence: "Make people feel like they'll miss out if they don't act now." Everything flows from that.

If you'd like to start a conversation about your next radio campaign, get in touch — and if you have answers to some of the questions above, bring them along. We'll take care of the rest.