Reviewed by Peter Berk, President and Chief Media Strategist, Berk Marketing · Last reviewed 26 August 2026
Radio Commercial Production
A commercial is not a separate project that happens after the buy. The schedule decides how many times someone hears it, the format decides who is listening and in what frame of mind, and the offer decides whether they do anything about it. Berk Marketing writes commercials in house and produces them against the schedule they will actually run on.
No cost, no obligation. Or call (866) 747-4707 and speak with Peter Berk or one of his Berk Marketing colleagues.
Radio commercial production is the work of turning a campaign objective into a finished audio file a station can air: the strategy, the script, the voice, the recording, the music and effects, and the versions and traffic instructions the stations need. Berk Marketing writes in house, produces with its own retained voice talent, and subcontracts additional voices when a spot calls for them.
The reason it belongs with the media buy rather than beside it is that almost every creative decision on radio is really a media decision wearing different clothes. Spot length is a rate decision. Whether you write for a host to read is a negotiation decision. How many versions you need is a market-count decision.
What we actually do
Everything below is work Berk Marketing performs or arranges directly. Where an outside cost is involved, it is named as one.
What Berk Marketing does not do is sell you production you do not need. If a spot you already own is working, the honest advice is to keep running it and put the money into frequency.
The voice
Most agencies hand you a casting session. Berk Marketing starts from a known quantity: Bruce Barker, an award-winning voice talent and creative director, is the voice behind the BigLou.com life insurance commercials, one of the longest running direct response radio campaigns in the country.
That relationship is why voice work is usually not a line item. Berk Marketing retains Bruce on an ongoing basis, so for most clients his read is included rather than billed per spot. When a campaign needs a different voice (a woman’s read, a second character, a language other than English, a celebrity or specialist), that talent is engaged for the project and the cost is passed through at what it costs.
Synthetic voices are now a practical option for some narrow uses: rapid variant testing before a real read is committed, or a market-specific tag where only a phone number changes. They are the exception, not the house style, and Berk Marketing will tell you when a spot is one and when it is not.
Not sure whether your current spot is the problem or the schedule is? Get in touch and we will tell you which one we would fix first.
Length
Length is the first creative decision and the first budget decision, and it is a mistake to make it in that order. A 60 buys room for a story, a proof point and a repeated phone number. A 30 buys one idea said clearly. A 15 is a reminder that only works when something else has already done the explaining.
The trap is assuming shorter is proportionally cheaper. It rarely is, and the rate difference between a 30 and a 60 on the same station is often far smaller than the difference in what you can say. We work that comparison out against your actual schedule rather than in the abstract. The mechanics are covered in our guide to radio ad length best practices for 15, 30 and 60-second spots.
Format
These are different products bought in different ways, and the choice changes what production even means for your campaign. A produced spot is an asset you own and can run anywhere. A host read is a piece of someone else’s credibility rented for sixty seconds, and it cannot be moved to another station.
| Produced spot | Host read | |
|---|---|---|
| What you own | A finished file you can run on any station | A performance tied to that host and show |
| Consistency | Identical every airing | Varies by read; talking points, not a script |
| Credibility | From the writing and the offer | Borrowed from the host’s relationship with listeners |
| Production cost | Written and produced once, amortised over the run | Little or no production; cost sits in the rate |
| Control | Complete, including compliance language | Partial; disclosures need negotiating up front |
| Portability | Runs across markets and platforms | Does not transfer to another station or host |
| Best for | Multi-market schedules, regulated categories, testing | Single strong show, trust-led categories, endorsement |
Most campaigns of any size end up running both. If you are weighing an endorsement, our guides on using host reads and live endorsements effectively and on what host endorsements cost cover how they are priced and negotiated.
Craft
Radio is heard, usually once, usually by someone doing something else. Every one of these exists to survive that.
Structure
People listening to the radio are not hearing every word the way you do when you are the one paying for the spot. So the structure is built around partial attention: say what it is, make it matter, say it again, and hold the call to action until the end. By that point, if the first forty five seconds have done their job, the listener is waiting for it.
Plainly, and early.
The detail that makes it matter to someone who is only half with you.
The listener who missed it the first time has not stopped being a customer.
Frequency inside the spot, not only across the schedule.
Slowly and clearly, two or three times. A toll-free number or a web address.
This shape suits direct response. A brand campaign, or a listener who already knows you, may be better served by one vivid idea and a name. Treating any single formula as universally correct is how a category ends up with fifty commercials that sound the same.
Process
Objective, audience, market list, offer, budget and the schedule the spot has to live on.
One or two directions, in writing, before anything is recorded.
Written to exact length and read aloud against a stopwatch, because scripts that look right on the page frequently are not.
Your changes, plus any compliance or legal wording your industry requires.
Usually Bruce. Where a spot needs a different voice, we cast it and tell you what it costs before we book it.
Including alternate reads of the lines most likely to need changing later.
Music, effects, final timing, and a check that the phone number survives at low volume in a moving car.
Files to spec, labelled, with traffic instructions per market and per version.
Variants in market, tracked separately, with a plan for what happens to the loser.
When a campaign has to be on air fast, this compresses. See how to launch a radio campaign in 24 hours for what that version looks like and what it costs you.
Cost
There is no rate card here and we are not going to invent one. What we can do is be specific about where the money goes and which parts are usually free to you.
Production is one line in a campaign budget and rarely the largest. How it sits against airtime, talent fees and tracking is laid out on our radio advertising costs page.
By category
Some categories have settled conventions worth using and some have conventions worth breaking. A few we work in often:
Format changes the writing as much as category does. Talk radio in particular rewards a different construction from music radio. That is covered in creative formats that work best on talk radio.
Testing and measurement
Producing more than one version is only useful if the results come back separately. That means distinct tracking per creative: a different number, a different code, a different landing page, decided before the spots are cut, not after the campaign is live.
Our guide to testing multiple radio creatives quickly covers how to run a clean read in a short window. On the measurement side, call tracking, attributing leads from radio to sales and the KPIs worth watching are each covered in more depth.
A creative test that changes the script, the voice and the offer at once has told you nothing. Change one thing.
Hear the work
Three sixty-second spots, two advertisers, three different kinds of buy. All written in house by Berk Marketing.
BigLou.com · :60 · National radio
Direct response life insurance, national terrestrial placement. Voiced by Bruce Barker, with its own tracking number on air.
BigLou.com · :60 · SiriusXM
Same advertiser, same voice, same length, written for a satellite audience, and carrying a different tracking number again.
XTermite · :60 · Local radio
XTermite Natural Termite Control, a San Diego orange-oil termite company and a Berk Marketing client since 1999.
These are the two ends of the business in the same three files. BigLou.com is a national direct response campaign running on network radio and satellite, where the job of the writing is to make a stranger dial a number. XTermite sells a local service in three Southern California counties, where the job is to be the name someone remembers when they find damage in a beam. Same shop, same process, completely different construction. Each spot carries its own number on air, so response is counted per placement instead of pooled into one figure nobody can act on.
The BigLou.com campaign is written up in full in the BIG LOU Insurance case study.
Peter Berk’s perspective
The first thing I look at is structure. People listening to the radio are not hanging on every word the way you do when you are the one paying for the spot. They are daydreaming, half listening, occasionally paying full attention. That is why a sixty introduces the offer or the service, embellishes it, repeats it, repeats it again, and only then gives the call to action, slowly and clearly, two or three times at the end. If we have done our job in the first forty-five seconds, the listener is expecting that number before it arrives.
For direct response we always end on a toll-free number or a web address, and the address has to be as short and as easy to spell as we can make it. Clients rarely think in those terms. They are in love with their own domain and have never heard it read out loud. When it is complicated, we tell them to register something simple that rolls over to their real site, and to buy the misspelled versions too. Radio listeners cannot remember what they hear, which is why we repeat. And they cannot spell what they hear, which is why we buy the misspellings.
FAQs
Yes. Berk Marketing writes commercials in house and subcontracts professional voice talent as needed.
Most client work is voiced by Bruce Barker, Berk Marketing’s Creative Director and National Voice Talent, who is also the voice behind the BigLou.com campaign. Where a spot calls for a different voice, that talent is engaged for the project.
For clients whose media Berk Marketing places, the writing and the standard voice read are generally included rather than billed per spot. Costs that are genuinely outside, such as additional voice talent or certain music licences, are passed through at cost and quoted before they are committed.
Ask us. The arrangement above is built around clients whose campaigns we also place, so a production-only project is quoted case by case rather than assumed.
A straightforward spot with a settled offer can move from brief to station delivery inside a few days. What extends it is almost never the recording. It is approval cycles, compliance review and changes to the offer after the script is written.
Occasionally, and only where it genuinely suits the job: rapid variant testing before a real read is committed, or a market-specific tag where only a detail changes. It is not the house approach, and we tell clients which of their spots is which.
Enough to learn something and not so many that no single version accumulates frequency. Two creative variants tracked separately is a useful starting point on most schedules.
Yes, by engaging appropriate talent for the project. Translation is treated as a rewrite rather than a word-for-word conversion, because an offer that scans in English frequently does not scan anywhere else.
Yes. Different phone numbers, addresses, service areas or offers can be cut from one master, which is usually far cheaper than producing each market separately.
We write to the requirements your category and your states impose, and we accommodate station standards departments where they have their own. Final legal sign-off stays with you.
Terms are set per project and depend partly on the talent engaged, since voice contracts carry their own usage terms. We put the terms in writing before recording rather than after.
Yes, and quite often that is the right answer. If a spot is working, the money is usually better spent on frequency than on a new one. We will tell you if we think the spot is the weak link.
Send us the commercial and the schedule it is running on. We will tell you whether the creative is the problem, the schedule is the problem, or neither is, before you spend anything on a rewrite.
Or call (866) 747-4707.
Tell us who you want to reach and what you want to accomplish. No obligation, and nothing is placed until you approve it.
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