The Music For Life Institute is the parent organization of the African Children’s Choir based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. This nonprofit organization has several choirs touring the world to raise money and awareness for millions of African children across Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa.
Here are a few radio public service announcements produced recently to be played in cities where they’re touring to promote ticket sales and donations.
To enable the choir’s local audience to hear the children’s energetic voices, as well as to pomote ticket sales and donations, I scripted and pre-produced the audio music tracks for two :30 radio public service announcements. The local community or church can use these music beds to record their own commercials that are played on local stations to announce the venue name, date and phone number to buy tickets:
I’m proud to have over 25 years of travel copywriting expertise across a wide range of clients and periodicals. These include resorts in North America, top-rated airlines that cross the globe, one of the world’s most popular cruise lines, restaurants in Northern California, and adventure/scuba diving magazines from the United States, Singapore and New Zealand.
Wearing a variety of hats — from straw hats for golf to neoprene caps for scuba diving –– I’ve written:
• Quarterly enewsletters and Websites for Red Sail Sports from 2002 to 2009. This included the main Website at www.redsail.com, then separate sites for each of this largest resort based diving and watersports operator in Grand Cayman andAruba. For the latter, I had a spectacular visit filled with scuba diving, snorkeling, parasailing, lunch and sunset catamaran cruises, and more. Read Watersports Paradise Found.
• A year of monthly enewsletters and promotional emails for All Nippon Airways.
• Print ads for Frontier Airlines that helped an ad agency in Dallas win the account –– even after I left Texas and moved back to the West Coast.
• The initial website, three Annual Reports and miscellaneous brochures for Hawaii Air Ambulance.
• Shore brochures for Alaska, Mexico and the Caribbean for Princess Cruises.
• Weekly ads and radio commercials for a three-year span for Caesars Tahoe Resort Casino, Nevada, to promote its wide variety of stellar entertainers.
• Over 20 magazine articles for Scuba Times, Alert Diver, Adventure Journal, Sport Diver Interactive, Dive Pacific Magazines, Asian Diver, Dive Travel, Undercurrent’s Travelin’ Diver’s Chapbook, Marin Independent Journal, S.F. Chronicle and L.A. Times about diving in Maui, the Turks & Caicos Islands, Australia, Kosrae (Micronesia), Baja California (Sea of Cortez), Aruba, Florida, The Bahamas, Monterey (CA), Belize, and other tropical, warm water destinations.
• I’ve traveled through 40 US states and throughout the world.
• I’m also the managing editor for www.vagablond.com, a luxury ezine for travel, shopping, food and wine, where I’ve posted over 1,400 articles since 2005. Some of my favorite articles include:
I first wrote this Midwest client’s :30 radio jingles and a direct mail project. Then, their East Coast agency asked me to edit the Home Page script and FAQs section for an innovative, interactive Web site: www.my2020.com/. Have a look…
I wrote these spots for a client in the Midwest through an agency on the East Coast, which proves I don’t have to live in your town to write, direct and product great radio copywriting for you:
As a San Francisco copywriter, I’ve written, directed and produced over 450 radio commercials for packaged goods, services and technology clients.
Here are a few of the “as produced” MP3s for my favorite radio scripts for clients as diverse as:
• Caesars Tahoe Resort Casino featuring Ken Nordine of “WordJazz” fame to describe “The Caesars Odyssey” promotion within “The Glory, The Grandeur, And The Games” theme.
• Greyhound Lines with a :60 jingle for their casino service to Reno, Lake Tahoe and Atlantic City.
• Farmers Direct Auto Insurance with a humorous twist to a serious subject.
• Foremost Foods Cottage Cheese with Paul Frees (former voice of Scrooge McDuck, Capt. Crunch, Boris Badenov, and many other animated cartoon characters).
• And Barron Mortgage Company with one of their mortgage brokers telling a few humorous success stories.
As a San Francisco copywriter, I’ve been an ad agency staff and freelance copywriter for virtually every financial institution in California, from Bank of America and Wells Fargo to Charles Schwab, Visa, and some dot coms, like Yodlee and Intuit.
Here are my favorite ads, ad banners, and radio commercial that I created as a San Francisco copywriter and direct marketing copywriter for Bank of America.
1) Bank of America — As an Associate Creative Director at Grey Advertising, San Francisco copywriter, I wrote this campaign of three newspaper ads for BofA’s Home Loan division. The ads were to have run for six weeks. But after only two, the client asked the agency to stop running them because the phone lines were swamped with a surplus of calls. Offering BofA’s lowest rates and the first ever refinancing adjustable rate home loans were also contributing factors to their success. Download Ad #1 PDF Download Ad #2 PDF Download Ad #3 PDF
2) Bank of America/Nation’s Bank Animated Banners – For Carat Interactive Ad Agency, I wrote a bunch of banners for BofA after it became Nation’s Bank. (Of course, it’s now called Bank of America once again.) See the banners — scroll down to bottom of page.
3) Bank of America Priority Plus Home Loan :60 Radio Commercial and Newspaper Ad — This commercial needed to demonstrate that the bank was committed to approving applicants for adjustable rate home loans in only three business days, rather than weeks. So I found the world’s fastest talker in New York City, flew her to SF for a recording session, and hired a male voice actor as her “translator” for this script. You really can hear every word she says if you listen carefully. “PLAY NOW” to hear the “Priority Plus Fast Home Loans” MP3. Download Priority Plus Home Loan Ad PDF.
For three of the seven years that I worked at Ketchum Advertising, San Francisco, I was a copywriter on the KRON-TV NewsCenter 4 account.
For their news promotions, we would receive the news story scripts on a Monday each week. By Tuesday, we’d have created three newspaper ads with copy and layout, plus a radio script with three different tags.
This account forced me to think creatively, strategically and efficiently!
Here are four completed commercials of the dozens of radio scripts that I wrote for NewsCenter 4.
One of my favorite clients when I was a young copywriter at Ketchum Advertising, San Francisco (now TWBA Chiat-Day) was also one of my first clients: Lindsay Olives.
Advertising copywriting, I believe, should be entertaining with humorous headlines. So here are two I wrote that I still like, many years later. The first was a recipe ad that ran in Good Housekeeping and other women’s magazine. For it, we dressed a model up like the Mona Lisa, so the headline was “Presenting Mona Lindsay’s Olive Meatloaf.” The bacon-and-olive meatloaf recipe tasted much better than it looked.
The second ad ran in football programs in the Bay Area (49ers, Raiders, Cal & Stanford) because the Lindsay Olive sales team would take their clients to the games. For this one, we created the fun Lindsay Olive “Half-Time-At-The-Football-Game” Game.Download the ad PDF.
For Lindsay, I also wrote and produced some hilarious radio commercials that won lots of major awards. The first was a Jewish Olive talking about his son. The second was a “nebbishy” olive who was very homely.
Listen to these two :60 MP3 Lindsay Olive radio commercials now.
A few years ago, I was asked to write a radio script and produce it for Hooked on Phonics, one of the world’s most popular reading tools for children.
My own daughter was beginning to read at the time and I strongly believed in phonics being able to help young readers to read better.
My script featured a father telling a bedtime story to his little girl. But he made it more entertaining for her by weaving in a yarn about the letters of the alphabet holding meetings, mergers, leveraged buyouts and stock options.
The bottom line is this call to action in the script: “If you’re a parent, you don’t have to invent stories to get your kids to love reading. Just go to the best place in cyberspace for help… the Hooked on Phonics Web site. Visit us today at A-B-C-D-E-F-G dot com. Take the FREE personalized reading assessment to find out how to help your child become a more confident reader…”
Listen to the MP3 now for the :60 “Hooked on Phonics Fairy Tale” radio spot below.
My colleague, Ivan Lee, and I created a series of five animated banners in various sizes for a now-defunct VoIP telecom solution called TomatoVine.com. The sizes were 728×90, 468×60, 160 x 60, 120 x 600 and 300 x 250.
Bridges Marketing Group of Walnut Creek asked me to write, direct and produce four :30 spots within a week in March 0f 2007. No problem.
Below are the first two of commercials: “Yo Dude” and “Baseball.”
Plus, a few years ago, I wrote and produced these two :30 radio spots for the agency’s tagline: “Fung Shui your holiday with BART: “Holiday Travel/Shopping.”
• Quarterly 
• Ads and outdoor boards for the 
Newspaper ads and radio spots for the 
1) Bank of America — As an Associate Creative Director at Grey Advertising, San Francisco copywriter, I wrote this campaign of three newspaper ads for BofA’s Home Loan division. The ads were to have run for six weeks. But after only two, the client asked the agency to stop running them because the phone lines were swamped with a surplus of calls. Offering BofA’s lowest rates and the first ever refinancing adjustable rate home loans were also contributing factors to their success.
