Goodyear retailers ran a radio commercial not long ago. An
announcer bellowed details of a tire sale over what I originally
thought was a particularly obnoxious percussion soundtrack. But the
sound wasn’t drums. It was the repeated “Wheep! Wheep!” of power
wrenches tightening lug nuts, surely one of the world’s ugliest
sounds. And loud.
Car dealers love to create commercials with screaming, dueling
announcers, as though zero percent financing were some sporting
event coming to a climax. A local auto glass replacement outfit
introduces its radio spots with a veritable Stentor roaring, “New
England…is Giant country!” You can’t escape Giant Glass; they
sponsor the Red Sox.
They’re loud, too.
Verizon DSL spots employ a woman and a man who play at emergency
room intensity and try to out-yell each other: “This system is on
life support!” “We have major dial-up problems!” “Connectivity is
critical!”
If anything kills talk radio, it will be the commercials and
station promos: Too many of them going on too long, sometimes seven
or eight or nine at a clip.
And definitely too loud.
WHY ARE COMMERCIALS SO LOUD? It isn’t a new question. The Canadian
Radio and Television Commission got so many complaints some years
back about obnoxiously loud commercials that they printed their own
answer to the question, a nicey-nice pooh-pooh, titled “It’s a
Blast! Sound Levels and Loudness of Commercials.” Basically, the
Canadians said commercials weren’t loud, they just seemed
that way.
Right.
Commercials are loud because advertising clients, who pay for
them, want them loud. It starts there. Clients, advertising
agencies, and commercial production houses probably don’t say,
“Let’s make this one really loud.” But they do talk about “cutting
through the clutter” and “making the message stand out.” As the
Canadians point out, the recording engineers have two main tools to
make that happen.
One is called compression. Visualize a jumpy, all-over-the-place
audio wave, representing a normal, varying sound conversation, a
back-and-forth bit of jazz banter between instruments. Now draw two
horizontal lines, one above the median of that wave and one below,
clipping off the peaks and the valleys. The overall volume will be
decreased, because of cutting off the tops and bottoms of the
amplitude waves. Now increase the volume to the original level.
What’s left won’t be any “louder” than what came before, but it
will seem so because the volume has become uniform throughout.
The other tool, “sound re-shaping,” emphasizes irritating,
attention-getting frequencies. Thus the common use of bombastic
percussion behind a voiceover, ringing slap echo on the voices
themselves, and the employment of bleating surfer-boy announcers
(“Sell your time-share for KYAASSHHH!”). Compress and clip the
whole thing to a fare-thee-well and you’ve got your modern
commercial.
Station promos are even worse.
I LIKE ADVERTISING. I WORKED in advertising for years. But
advertising can cut its own throat. Surely a great many radio
commercials are doing just that. If you create a commercial that
immediately makes listeners turn down the volume or, worse, turn
the radio off, what good does that do?
So enough, already. Give me good old soothing George Zimmer
telling me I’m going to like the way I look, or David Oreck
offering me a 30-day money back guarantee, or Neil Clark Warren
crooning about “troo luhhv.” But advertisers in the irritation
business can forget about my business.
