Gone commercial

It all started yesterday when one of our creative agencies seemingly couldn't be arsed doing what our advertising coordinator asked them to do. We wanted a radio script but had nothing. I knew we'd had trouble with him before, so I said "show me the brief," and I wrote some copy. When the agency's script actually arrived, it really sucked anyway and the people doing the ad preferred mine, and after a slight tweak it was ready to record. I was quite happy to be the 'talent' on this one. I've worked in radio quite a bit so I knew what I'd have to do and we thought that by having a different voice from the standard DJs we might get people's attention better. So our little jaunt to MMM this afternoon reminded me why I hate commercial radio so much. See, I had the tone of the piece perfectly in my head. I wanted it to sound as though the guy from The Secret Life of Us who does all those voiceovers, was having an encouraging word or two with some timid, confused uni graduate who didn't know what to do with his life. Instead, after a couple of what I thought were good reads, the producer there kept telling me to 'bring it up a bit', 'be more enthusiastic about it', and 'put more of a smile' in my voice. Then it kind of hit home that I'm at a commercial radio station, where everyone is in that same mindset of 'loud and happy is better' and they don't realise that if everyone sounds loud and happy, then everyone's going to sound the same. I was trying for something different and commercial boy didn't like it. I was clearly not at the ABC anymore. I really can't understand how people listen to radio stations like that. It would be like spending your working day listening to a car salesman. It was quite revealing too, how much the decor of the studio reflected the demographic of the station. There were posters of Claudia Schiffer's cleavage, Cameron Diaz's cleavage and Jennifer Aniston's cleavage (as well as a calendar, which, every month, showed the cleavage and legs of some unknown model in a bikini). There were Blink 182 posters, Eminem posters, fake money from the Crazy Horse, tacky souvenir American number plates, and a Channel Ten poster of 'Mad About You' circa 1996. So everyone here loves the ad. I'm luke warm about it. And it's not like we let commercial boy get his way on everything. We drew the line at the jungle music. (And I didn't just misspell 'jingle' either).