I produce a lot of sponsor tags, and sadly, quite a few of them are written by sales execs. This means that their priority is to please the client, and sadly this means that bad tags get to air.
But when it comes to web addresses, there's an obvious mistake that can be easily avoided.
I've just made a tag for a restaurant, and it has their web address as part of it. The names have been changed to protect the guilty, but it looks something like this...
Drivetime... with the Southern Gate bistro... visit southern-gate.co.uk
Now that doesn't look too bad on paper, but on the radio that reads as Southern hyphen gate dot co dot u k. See that hyphen? It's not only an ugly word, but it ruins the flow of the tag and makes it much harder to remember. If they said visit Southern Gate dot co dot u k it'd flow much nicer.
And here's the annoying thing... the web address without the hyphen in it hasn't even been registered! They could buy it with a redirect on it for less than 5 pounds, and significantly improve the effectiveness of their campaign!
Case study: T Mobile are clever.
In print their web address is www.t-mobile.com
On the radio it's www.tmobile.com
Both go to the same place, one is easier to read on a poster, the other is easier to remember on a radio commercial. They both promote the same company, and there's no confusion between it.
And one final thought for non-USA clients... if you can use .com instead of .co.uk then you'll save four syllables, and there's less chance of the listener typing it in wrongly.
In fact... spend another fiver, and buy both versions.
