During my time at Virgin Radio in London, I observed an interesting thing when the station promoted, on-air, a competition to enter on their website. They ran a 30-second spot – highly produced, and sounding great; and they also wrote a script for the presenter, which used the same words as the pre-recorded spot. The presenter script, consistently, delivered at least twice as many visits to the website. I concluded from this small experiment that presenter-read advertisements are very effective.

So, what happens when those ads are within a portion of programming that people generally turn the volume up for?

I’m in a small office, around an hour south of Vancouver. Computer screens in front of me, mounted on the wall, show traffic cameras from across the city. There don’t appear to be much problems now: the early morning peak well passed. I chat with a few people, including Kaitlyn Herbst, a bubbly dark-haired girl who doesn’t look like she was at work at 5.45am this morning. She sits in a small voice booth with sound-proofing foam on the walls, peering out at her colleagues in the office, who are relaxing in this comparative downtime.

I show off my little iRiver B10 – a small, FM/DAB radio with a colour-screen that I was given over four years ago. I talk about the need to think about visuals in radio’s future, not just audio. Without any warning, Kaitlyn starts talking about the traffic situation in Vancouver. Not too many problems, a few roadworks, nothing unusual. She signs off, and rejoins the conversation – after reading a small, in-bulletin advertisement.

The office belongs to CTN – the Canadian Traffic Network. CTN produces traffic news across many major markets in Canada; this office, in Boundary Bay airport, produces traffic news for the large Vancouver stations. Over there, behind a door that looks like any other door, the office opens up into a large hangar, with four helicopters in it – one with a conspicuous Global News logo, the market-leading TV station in the Vancouver area.

Earlier in the morning, Kaitlyn had been in this helicopter with a colleague and the pilot, over the centre of Vancouver. She talks into a small, pen-shaped television camera, flicking between that and the external zoom camera that she also has control of; and also doing the travel for AM 730, the traffic station. From the ground, she’s being told about other pieces of traffic news from her base. She has to do all of this while appearing in control in the back of a helicopter which is particularly un-protected against turbulence in the air. Flying in a helicopter, if you’ve not done it, is a little like flying in a washing machine on spin cycle. Except rather louder. And it’s not as if there’s lots of space in there either – her colleague Rick Mulder sits in the front seat, and does the traffic for CKNW Newstalk 980 AM. (That’s the market-leading radio station – so CTN manages to do the #1 radio and #1 TV station from the helicopter.)

CTN – and GTN, the UK equivalent – earns its money from advertising within the traffic bulletins. People listen to what the traffic people have to say. In North America, roughly 50% of all radio listening occurs in a car (it’s about 25% in the UK, incidentally) so traffic news is very important. CTN is, of course, not a consumer brand; and advertisers may not know about what it offers. They ought to – I saw a small committed team, who got on very well together – and an advertising medium which should, if my experiences are anything to go by, work very well for anyone who wants to get a simple message across. Particularly when combined with spots on the station (for branding and explaining the message), it’s an area of advertising I’ve not been too aware of.

- On the CTN website you can watch Kaitlyn doing a report, and hear how it sounds on the radio.

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Disclaimer: It wasn’t only Kaitlyn that went up in the helicopter that morning. I got my own trip, over the city centre and the imposing North Shore mountains that overlook the area. I’m grateful to Peter Alpen, Coby Marsh, and Ryan Lidemark for their hospitality.

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