Straight Talk on getting Public Service Announcements/PSA’s on the air -

or

How not to waste your time and money creating and submitting Public Service Announcements/PSA’s that will never be heard.

We’ve looked (and we’ll keep looking), but we’ve yet to find a web site that gives the information about Public Service Announcements/PSA’s that follows here. No doubt there must be at least a few out there telling the whole truth, though at the present time there doesn’t appear to be enough of us to even qualify as an overwhelming minority! This information will save you hours and dollars you would otherwise waste doing it the way everyone else is doing it. (Note: we’ve actually found a couple of interesting PSA-related websites since the original publication of this article. You’ll find their links in the last section, “June 2006 Update.”)

The first thing you need to know…

You will need a media budget if you want your Public Service Announcement/PSA heard by the people you want to hear it.

Sorry. You might as well know before you start. Unfunded, unsolicited Public Service Announcements/PSA’s receive virtually no airplay of value. If you don’t have funding to buy time on a quality radio station, don’t bother writing/producing/duplicating/mailing/streaming/posting a message. You’re wasting your time and resources. Your time is better spent fundraising. The economics and the numbers are stacked too high against you to be overcome by your wishful thinking.

It doesn’t matter that you’re a non-profit organization. What matters is that the radio station is a for-profit organization. It doesn’t matter how worthy your cause is. Successful radio stations (which is where you want your message playing) did not get that way by giving away their product – a product which is very limited and highly perishable.

That Elaborate Package You Mailed To “Public Service Director?” It’s in the garbage.

In fact, we are unaware of any such full-time paid position in broadcasting with the job title, “Public Service Director.” Now, it’s true, if you phone a radio or television station and ask for the name of the PSA Director, they’ll give you to someone. It’s not their job, though. It’s an addendum to their job description. These individuals spend 99-percent of their time doing what they’re actually paid to do at the station, and the other one-percent throwing away 99-percent of the Public Service Announcement/PSA requests they receive. (We see where some stations will take your Public Service Announcement/PSA online. Good idea. Hitting the delete key is much more efficient for a station than having to process all the junk mail.)

Do some ever actually air? Yes. Unedited? During the day?! On a good station?!? More than once or twice?!?! Good luck!

You don’t want the station that wants your Public Service Announcement/PSA

We see numerous organizations now that put their Public Service Announcement/PSA online. The html text gives all kinds of support information as to the worthiness of the cause, and promotes award-winning actors starring in the message. The intent is for the PSA to be downloaded by radio stations that would want to air it.

Get out of your world and into the world of the broadcast station operator for a moment. Any station that will pay an employee to surf the web to download Public Service Announcements to air free is a station you don’t need. If they’ll download your PSA and give it significant free airplay, it’s because they can’t sell their time. And if they can’t sell their time, they have a problem with listenership, programming, or management. Probably all three. (The net effect is the same if you mailed the PSA and they’re airing twice an hour.)

So how can my Non-Profit/Worthy Cause get its Public Service Announcement/PSA aired at quality times on quality stations?

Approach a broadcast station or network like a paying customer. You can be a small paying customer and still be treated well. Everyone’s on a limited budget. (We’re still waiting for the day someone calls and tells us, “and by the way, you need to know, I’m working with an unlimited budget, so please make your proposal irresponsible!”) When the broadcast outlet you call realizes you’re a non-profit or cause marketer willing to pay to air a Public Service Announcement/PSA, they will in most cases (not in every case!) knock themselves out to make you feel like you’re getting a good return on your investment and earn your repeat business. And guess who goes to the head of the line for the limited time made available for free PSA’s?

You do!

Public Service Announcement/PSA Campaigns are Advertising Campaigns to the Broadcast Stations and Networks that air them.

Start with your media budget. If you don’t have a media budget, you don’t have a campaign.

Most firms offering assistance with Public Service Announcements/PSA’s are production houses. Their business is selling awesome sounding radio announcements. They’re mostly very good at what they do. But they don’t tell you they can’t get your announcement aired free of charge!

Some of them offer a Public Service Announcement/PSA production and distribution package that includes a “guarantee of performance.” You know what that is? It’s a media budget. Let’s put it all in layman’s terms:

What these firms sell you (and it’s at least 90% of what you pay for) is AWARD WINNING PRODUCTION. That’s your finished PSA. It’ll sound so good, it’ll give you goose pimples. Then they handle DISTRIBUTION. That means the more stamps and duplicate recordings you pay them for, the more radio station wastebaskets you’ll end up in. MONITORING means they’ll include a postcard asking the station to write back and tell them when they aired the PSA. (One more thing for the station to throw away.) GUARANTEE OF PERFORMANCE means you’ll pay them additional funds for them to buy the time to get it aired. Which is where we began.

There’s nothing wrong with paying a really fabulous production house for a really fabulous sounding message. You just need to understand, without a media budget, you’re the only one who’s going to hear it.

Again, it all starts with your media budget. And if you can’t budget additional funds for AWARD WINNING PRODUCTION, work with the radio station or network you want to buy time on. They’ll produce something for you. It won’t win an award, but the production will be FREE and the message will be HEARD. Pay a production house for production AND NOTHING MORE. Placing your own media eliminates the need to “buy” distribution, monitoring, and guarantee of performance.

How Illinois Radio Network and Michigan Radio Network can help, and how it can’t.

Illinois Radio Network specializes in statewide airing of Public Service Announcement/PSA campaigns; Michigan Radio Network specializes in statewide airing of Public Service Announcement/PSA campaigns as well, each in their own state. For what a modest radio campaign in a single Illinois or Michigan city might cost, you get border-to-border airplay of your PSA, high-demand times on high-demand stations.

If you have your produced announcement, you only need one copy. The networks have free production services if you need them. (Sorry, as of this date, no awards won for production!)

Please note: we can only help you if your message is appropriate for our statewide audiences. If your appeal is localized to a single town or metropolitan area, we’re too big. Call radio stations in the towns you need to reach and ask for the local sales manager. If you need a regional or national appeal, we’re too small. We recommend you call Tom Dobrez at StateNets, 708-799-6676.

We hope this information helps you spend smarter on your next Public Service Announcement/PSA campaign. When Illinois and/or Michigan make sense for your appeal, we look forward to talking to you as well!

How to get Public Service Announcements/PSA’s on Illinois Radio Stations: call Dale Barnes at /312-943-6363. How to get Public Service Announcements/PSA’s on Michigan Radio Stations: call Phil Orth at 517-484-4888.

June 2006 Update - New Information since this Article was first Posted in June, 2003.

File this under the somewhat well known Dolly Parton quotation, “You’d be surprised how much is costs to look this cheap.”

A fantastic website for understanding how much money it costs to realize a “successful” campaign using “free” public service time is http://www.psaresearch.com. This is the site of the Public Service Advertising Research Center, a “division,” if you will, of Goodwill Communications. Goodwill Communications is a very successful manufacturer of PSA campaigns.

This site provides a ton of information on the creation of PSA campaigns. Best of all, although perhaps not intentionally, it confirms what this article says from the get-go: You will need a media budget if you want your Public Service Announcement/PSA heard by the people you want to hear it.

Or, to rephrase Dolly Parton, “You’d be surprised how much it costs to buy free air time.” In fact, the unspoken message throughout the PSA Research Center website seems to be, “Hope this info is useful, and don’t call us for help with your campaign until you have several million dollars for us to do the job right.” Nothing wrong with that. Ultimately, their message is the same as ours; you can’t get a PSA campaign on the air without ad campaign kind of money.

Notice, in fact, how at the PSA Research Center, PSA no longer stands for “Public Service Announcement,” but rather, “Public Service Advertising.” Confirms another thing we’ve been saying all along: Public Service Announcement/PSA Campaigns are Advertising Campaigns to the Broadcast Stations and Networks that air them.

We don’t agree with everything on this site, though. That has to do with what we would call the:

False Value of Airtime

(The next sentence may shock you to your core. As a precaution, please sit down before you read any further.) (Ready? Proceed.) Broadcast outlets employ the creative use of dayparts to create false (or inflated) value for commercial airtime. (We know, we know - an almost impossible concept to grasp, isn’t it?) Hours of the day that have more listeners, or viewers, are worth more than hours that have fewer. Creating a broad daypart with the implied promise of even rotation can give an advertiser an opportunity to gamble on a higher priced hour while paying less than the going rate for it. If the even rotation doesn’t materialize, however, the advertiser ends up overpaying for less valuable time.

 Here’s what we mean: (Stay with us! This will take a few paragraphs to explain.) Audience levels vary hour-by-hour, and daypart-by-daypart. There are more listeners at 7:00 a.m. than 7:00 p.m., and more at 12:00 noon than at 12:00 midnight. If an advertiser goes into a top-rated news station in a major market and tells them they want their commercial to air at exactly 7:00 a.m. , they might be charged $1,000.00 (or more) for such a highly-rated and specific time. If the advertiser gets sticker-shock, they can buy morning drive (5:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.) for $750.00 and hope their commercial runs at 7:00 a.m. But it also might run at 9:50 a.m., when all those morning drivers are at work, coffee’d up, and in a meeting or on a conference call or anywhere but in their car captively listening to the radio.

If $750.00 is still too rich for the advertiser’s blood, they might opt for a 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. rotation. They might be able to buy this daypart for $400.00, and they can hope their commercial still airs in morning drive. But if it airs at 7:35 p.m. , that hour’s rating might not even justify a $400.00 expenditure.

The same advertiser could spread their risk a little further, by buying a 6:00 a.m. to Midnight rotation for maybe $175.00, and hope their commercial runs before the sun sets, or they could really roll the dice and buy a 24-hour rotator for $50.00, and cross their fingers they don’t end up with their commercial running overnight.

What does this have to do with falsifying the value of airtime, especially to some concern that’s not buying time anyway, but angling for donated PSA time?

When PSA campaign results are reported, if not in every single case then pretty much awfully darn close to it, dayparts are going to broadened to inflate the value of the donated time received. If your PSA aired at 2:55 a.m. , the value of the air time is about a dollar. So it will be reported as having ran in a 24-hour rotation and valued at $50. If the PSA ran at 11:20 p.m., that time might be worth $20.00-$25.00, but it will get reported as having ran in a 6:00 a.m.-12:00 midnight rotation and valued at $175.00. You see where this is going.

The dollar value claims of what a given PSA campaign generates is likely to be significantly higher than what a detailed audit would reveal. If you’re content with theoretical value, then use your resources for high-end production and mass distribution. If it really matters to you when and where your message is heard, use your resources to buy the time yourself. And if you don’t have resources for either, go back to the beginning. You’re not going to get any airplay of value without a media budget.

Another Good/Instructive Website

Since this article was originally published, we’ve also heard some stations in Chicago that give (a lucky few) Public Service concerns a very nice presentation. The event or cause will receive an extended reading, 30-seconds or more, then a referral to the station’s website for more information. For an example, link to: http://www.wdrv.com/volunteerism. If your message is selected for inclusion, you’re going to get one nice something for nothing. That’s the good news.

The bad news?

What if your event or cause isn’t selected for that day’s/week’s PSA list?

If you event or cause is one of the ones chosen, what kind of return are you going to get with an on-air frequency of one? Have you ever, willfully, devoted discretionary time of your own to surfing radio station websites to see what their current PSA’s are?

Me neither.