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Can Flemyng really help shoot up DAB sales?

Posted in Advertising, Digital, Oliver Milman, Latest reporters' blogs July 3rd, 2007 by Oliver Milman

Jason Flemyng, the actor rarely seen since the start and end of Guy Ritchie’s career in Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, is an interesting choice to front an advertising campaign urging us to buy DAB radios.

Back when Oasis made decent albums, Flemyng (pictured) was seen as something of a pin-up. So why has he been used in a campaign heard only on the radio when other voices would’ve been more distinctive?

This is, after all, radio’s big chance to sell itself on its own medium. The commercial sector is in agreement that increasing sluggish DAB radio sales is key to boosting revenues and taking on the BBC.

Instead, Flemyng provides a simple introduction and conclusion to 40 (yes, 40!) different, yet essentially similar, spots in which members of the public painstakingly detail to us the benefits of using digital radio.

This rather uninspired format is set to run until Christmas when, if we all haven’t been put off buying a DAB set in fear of listening to more ads like this, sales traditionally soar.

To be fair to Flemyng, he does a competent, understated job in the limited brief he’s been given. Many contemporary radio adverts fail miserably due to brand’s insistence on using ‘wacky’ characters that, in attempting to grab the listener’s attention, merely irritate.

As Fru Hazlitt, radio giant GCap’s new London supremo, has admitted, many radio ads are utter dross. Due to lazy creative work and poor targeting, radio advertising has fallen woefully behind its television counterpart. The fact that radio is currently seen as ‘unsexy’ and irrelevant when the world of online advertising seems so inviting doesn’t exactly help.

Therefore, you would’ve thought that the radio industry itself could come up with a decent series of ads and a memorable, dynamic figurehead to drive sales of DAB radios. Were memorable voices such as that of Stephen Fry or the country’s top comedy writers all unavailable for this campaign?

At least we can be thankful that Guy Ritchie wasn’t at the helm, sparing us from the prospect of Flemyng butchering a rival East End mob with a machete concealed within a DAB radio. Or anything involving Madonna.