Originally written ten years ago this week, on July 12th,
2006. At the time I was working as copywriter/production director for an
upstate New York radio station cluster.

Yesterday was a pretty unusual day for me, as I was asked to take part
in a local educational initiative inspired by The Apprentice TV show.
Two groups of kids between 10 and 15 are competing to create a radio
advertisement for a local car dealer, and I was called in to help them
tweak the scripts they came up with, then record their commercials with a
portable digital recorder, and finally bring them back to the radio
station to produce the final commercials.

Amusingly, the scene of
the recording session was the local community college, not only the
college I attended 20 years ago, but we were in (I’m 90 percent sure)
the actual room of the Mass Media course I took twice a week back then.
The two groups, with six or so kids in each, were interested, excited
and fully engaged in their project, creating a car commercial for a
local dealership. I found it a great experience to go over the work they
had done and show them where and how it could be slightly better. Both
scripts were fine starting points – God knows I’ve been handed worse by
professional agencies working out of major cities – but each had
places where they could be made better, and as I proposed each change, I
made sure each of the kids understood my point and had no major
disagreements.

The tweaked points ranged from the bizarre – I
removed the term “suicide doors” from one of the car ads, thinking
“suicide” is not a word I would want to associate with a motor vehicle
–  to the mundane, as in my suggestion that a character in a brief
three-person skit be named something other than “Mrs. Smith.” I tried to
convey that it’s good to use a more realistic name, and even conceded
that there are Smiths not that far back in my family tree, but something
a little more unusual but real would bring the listener that much
further in the story. I suggested “Pulaski” as one possibility, but the
kids settled on “Mrs. Loomis,” and that was good enough for me.

I
tried to talk as much as possible about the rationale I had for every
point I brought up as we went over their scripts, and the only point
where any argument came up was when I pointed out that the possessive
“its” in their script mistakenly had an apostrophe in it. That led into a
brief debate over the spelling of that contentious word, but I finally
(gently and in good humor) put my foot down on the issue. One of the
kids asked “Are you really good at English?” I kind of threw up my hands
in resignation and said “Apparently so!” That got a good laugh, and we
moved on.

The actual recording went very quickly with both sets
of kids; there were a few fluffed lines here and there that needed
re-recording (nothing us pros don’t have to do every time out, too), and
one brief bit that required a change of voice talent when the group
agreed that the needed enthusiasm was just not coming through. In all,
though, I was amazed and gratified to see how immersed these kids were
in their project. There was a real sense of teamwork among both groups,
and if one was a bit more competitive within its own ranks (arguing over
whether Harry Potter can really be killed off, for example – I pointed
out that it happened to Sherlock Holmes and Superman, too, and did
neither any real long-term harm as cultural archetypes), each member of
both groups clearly worked hard to do their part and contribute to the
process.

Back at the station, it took me about an hour and a half
to get both commercials fully produced and burned onto CD. The kids
will hear the spots at today’s session, and while I won’t be there, I am
seeing the guy who oversees the project later today when he comes in to
record his own weekly radio show, and I am anxious to hear what the
kids think about how their commercials turned out. For me, it was an
unusual application of twenty years of radio experience and a chance to
share that experience with young people interested in what I had to say.
Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.