Yes, we’ve said radio is not the obsolete medium you think it is. But actions speak louder than words. We just finished work on a new campaign for On The Fly – a San Francisco Men’s store (listen to our favorite spot below). And the spots make one point we’ve overlooked in our previous posting: 30 seconds is as good as 60. A few years back, radio made a marked shift away from the 60 second spot, and toward the 30 second spot. Agencies went into an uproar, claiming they wouldn’t have time to tell a story and engage the audience, which would result in diminished results.

But this was a symptom of an age-old advertising problem: good radio is hard to do and it doesn’t have the portfolio cache that TV does. So the hardest thing to do well always falls to new, less experienced writers. In other words, most agencies aren’t very good at radio in the first place – and the need to do it in half the time has simply shined a light on that fact. On the other hand, agencies that specialize in the “theater of the mind” are more in demand than ever.

Listen to more of our radio spots here