media update's Adam Wakefield spoke to Luckin at the 2017 Loeries® about what make great advertising great, Grey's win at the Loeries®, and why agencies in South Africa need to up their game if they are going to continue winning.

Great ideas need hard work to become award winning

Grey Advertising claimed three awards at the 2017 Loeries®, with two of those being a Silver and Bronze within the Outdoor Category. However, it was their work on the radio campaign, Times Change, Power Doesn't - Britney, Harry, Paris that saw the Johannesburg firm awarded a Campaign Gold.                                                                

"Jeff [Harvey, the writer], this is his first ever award. I love helping other people win. It’s really lovely that I’m involved in that process when someone else does something great and Jeff, in this case, came up with the idea and wrote the ads again and again and again, Luckin says."

The win will be a positive for Grey, as it shows that hard work can have the potential to get you onto the Loeries® stage.

"Jeff came in early in the mornings and he worked on his scripts. He just put his head down and worked," Luckin says. "We recorded them and we recorded them again and he just kept on it."

Crafting for radio means writing dialogue that sings

Radio as an adverting format greatly interests Luckin, to the point that she gives a lecture on the format about why radio is poor.

Well written dialogue is able to stand-up on its own, without the need for additional sound or images, with Luckin drawing attention to popular speeches in film.

“Beautifully written dialogue sings,” Luckin says.

"I always play a bit from Glengarry Glen Ross by Alec Baldwin, and the Inches speech by Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday, and Marlon Brando’s speech at the end of Apocalypse Now, where he talks about the inoculations and how the villagers cut the kids arms off."

What all those iconic speeches have in common is that they are written for a performance and a performer who is not sitting in a booth.

The biggest problem with radio, according to Luckin, is that it is too tinned. It is written down in a fashion resembling "Hello George. Hello Jenny. How are you?", which makes listeners want to switch off.

"Great radio is like theatre but it’s harder because, in live theatre, you learn how to time your pauses. If you pause too long, you don’t get a laugh; If you don’t pause long enough, you don’t get a laugh," Luckin explains.

"In a studio situation, you have to work that out without a live audience, but it’s crucial. If you look at the KFC campaign that won Grand Prix, they figured that out. It is has the freshness of the live performance. They got the comic timing right and that’s often it. Just a half a beat longer, it will be fantastic."

In Luckin's experience, radio adverts are recorded too quickly. When it came to Grey’s work on the Duracell commercial, they did their own pilots in the recording studio and Harvey recorded himself. The team then brought in the voice artist and played with pauses.

"He [the voice artist] read the whole script and then we made him play with pauses; half a pause, a long pause. That’s the thing that makes the difference. Just comic timing. It’s more important than anybody imagines," Luckin says.

South African agencies are no longer competing against themselves

Out of the five Grand Prixs that were awarded at the 2017 Loeries®, three of them were given to agencies based in Dubai. For Luckin, it is about time that South African agencies received a wakeup call that they are no longer just competing among themselves, but against agencies across Africa and the Middle East.

"It [the Loeries®] can’t just be our own cosy award ceremony anymore where we always win and, frankly, if you look at the Film category, the work from the Middle East was better. It was better crafted," Luckin says. "

"That campaign, Micro Politics, they didn’t play the whole commercial in the award ceremony but it is so good. It was genius and nothing from South Africa came close to that. We need to up our game. We can’t be parochial anymore."

In Luckin's view, South African agencies must raise their own bar. Simple as that.

For more information, visit www.loeries.com

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Luckin highlighted the KFC radio advertisement that won Grand Prix, which came about through a partnership between all involved in producing it. Read more in our article, Creativity is a partnership between brand and agency.