One Ad, One Message

A 30 second spot is about 70 spoken words. That is shorter than this paragraph will be by the time it ends, and people hear it while merging onto the highway or scraping a plate into the sink. So an ad gets one idea, and only one.

Beginners resist this because they have more to say and the airtime cost real money. It feels wasteful to pay for 30 seconds and say only one thing. But a listener who hears five points remembers none. A listener who hears one point twice remembers it, and maybe repeats it at dinner.

Find the single thought

Before you write a word of script, write the single thought: one sentence, 12 words or fewer, that you want stuck in someone's head after the ad is gone. Everything else in the ad either serves that sentence or gets cut.

Start with everything the client (or your committee, or you) wants to say. Then ask which one item would change the most minds if it were the only thing people heard. That is usually the item that is closest to the listener's own life: their money, their kid, their commute, their time.

Notice that the stronger version is a little ordinary. Good. A single thought is the plain idea you will later dress up with sound, story and pictures. Slogans come later, if at all. If you start with a clever line, you often end up with a clever ad that nobody can repeat.

Name the person

"Everyone" is not an audience. Every ad is written for someone, so pick on purpose. Write a short paragraph about one imagined person who is in the group you need to reach and could be moved.

For the library levy, the board's data says the measure failed two years ago by 140 votes, mostly in precincts with young families who did not turn out. So the person is something like this: Dana, 34, two kids under eight, works Monday through Friday, has never had a weekday afternoon free to get to the library, votes in presidential years and skips May elections.

Dana tells you a lot. The Saturday hours matter more to her than the roof. She needs to be told the election is in May and that it counts. She is listening in the car between daycare and work, so the ad has to work at 7:40 a.m. with a kid asking for juice. She will not respond to civic duty speeches. She might respond to a picture of Saturday morning at the library with her kids.

Your person should be someone who could go either way, or someone who agrees but might not act. Spending your 30 seconds on people already sure to vote yes, or certain to vote no, is the most common way to waste a budget.

Pick one action

The call to action is what you want the person to do when the ad ends. One action. Make it concrete and possible.

• Vote: say the date and, if it helps, the day of the week. "Tuesday, May 19" beats "this spring."
• Visit: give a web address short enough to remember after one hearing. HarlowLibrary.org works. harlowpubliclibrarydistrict.org/levy-2026-info does not.
• Call: phone numbers barely work on radio. If you must, say it twice and keep it simple, or use a short web address instead.
• Show up: give the day, the time and the place, in that order, and then repeat the day.

Stacking actions ("call, click, follow, vote, tell a friend") feels generous. It is a list of chores. Your listener picks none of them.

Write the creative brief

A creative brief is one page you fill out before writing. It keeps you honest when the committee wants to add the roof back in at the last minute. Here is a version short enough to actually use:

The "what they think now" and "what we want them to think" rows are the most useful lines on the page. If you cannot fill them in, you do not know your audience yet. Go find out. Talk to three people who fit the description. It takes an afternoon and saves a production budget.

The "must include" row matters more for political and issue ads than anything else on the page. Paid-for-by lines, candidate approval statements and AI disclosures take real seconds out of your spot. Lesson 6 covers them. Plan for them now so they do not ambush you at the mix.

Cutting the good stuff

The hardest edit in advertising is cutting a true, interesting fact. The library has served Harlow since 1911. That is a lovely fact. It does nothing for Dana at 7:40 a.m. Cut it.

There is one line you never cross while cutting. Leaving out unrelated facts is editing. Leaving out a fact that would change the meaning of what you did say is misleading. If the levy is $2.10 a month only on a $250,000 home, and most homes in town are worth $400,000, then "about two dollars a month" with no qualifier is a problem. Say "on a typical home" only if it is true of a typical home, or give the honest number. Every claim in a political or issue ad gets checked by somebody, usually the other side, and a fudged number becomes their next ad.