I Heard It On The Radio

I've always found radio ads tricky. They're short, imaginative and should be easy to write. But unless that Big Idea hits you, you could staring at a very bad radio ad. So when I write them, I find I have some good, some bad - it's all up to chance and my creativity that day.

My opinions changed today, however. We had to mark the first year students' radio ads. And what a time warp! Looking back, I can see the improvements I've made along the way, and the stuff I learned that I didn't even know I learned. I was not looking forward to marking these, considering my love/hate relationship with radio ads. But all in all, I found I learned a lot about what I had learned over the past year.

This exercise made me appreciate everything I've learned so far, and makes me proud when I read a good ad from a first year. Trust me, there were some bad, baaad, ads; but there were some good ones too. You can see the people who just get it and those who just didn't.

It was nice to take a step back and look at ad creative from a different perspective. When you're writing, you can get too involved in the ad. It was a nice reminder to just take a step back and look at what you're writing, and realize that even if you think you're in the same place you were a year ago, you've really gone so much farther than you thought.