M3- Conventions of a College Audio Ad

Conventions of a college advert

To create my audio advert it was important that I looked at what was successful in other college adverts. From my research I discovered that most radio ads last between 15-60 seconds, however the average tends to be longer. One of the ads I researched, St Mary’s Catholic sixth form was around 40 seconds long, I decided to make mine slightly longer as I wanted to meet all the requirements from my client brief. Another convention of audio sixth form ads was the better ones tended to be short and snappy, as well as straight to the point, however they had a balance between this and enough detail, for example St Mary’s catholic sixth form makes has students making short statements such as “achieve the first steps to my future career” These statements are short and snappy and get their point across, these are common in a lot of college adverts and are featured in mine. Another common convention of a college advert is important information but not too much detail so the listener wants to find out more, an example of this is again in St Mary’s catholic sixth form ad when the voice over says things like “98% pass rate” and “100% University placement success”. This does a good job at making their sixth form sound appealing and is definitely something that I included in mine “100% Success rate in all subjects”. Another common convention of all audio ads is a catchy sound bed, this makes the ad seem more upbeat and can also get stuck in a listener’s head and make them recall the advert later, which would be beneficial as it would increase the chances of them choosing this sixth form. My audio ad follows many codes and conventions of college audio adverts, I made sure that I looked at what was successful and not successful with ads and used that to my advantage.