How brands can create audio advertising that stirs the passions and drives business profits
Listen Up! is the first to define right- and left-brain creative features for audio advertising. Using brand and emotional data collected from over 50,000 radio and non-radio listeners across 10 years, this landmark publication from System1 and Radiocentre is uniquely placed to share how to make effective radio ads that can deliver long- and short-term results in an ever-evolving media landscape.
"Listen Up! demonstrates how radio is the ideal environment to entertain for commercial gain. The creation of mental availability, trust & behaviour change with right-brain creative features can inspire a new generation of audio advertising."
Andrew Tindall
Listen Up! Author; Global Director, System1
Our research, presented at HEARD 2025 by Andrew Tindall, revealed how brands can unlock radio’s full potential by leveraging Creative Fluency – ads that create strong emotional connections, boost memorability, and seamlessly integrate brand assets through sonic branding. The study reinforced Mark Ritson’s finding that allocating 11% of a media budget to radio can double campaign effectiveness.
Get the digital publication for free
Listen Up! is filled with powerful insights to help advertisers understand and improve their audio advertising effectiveness.
Audio advertising can produce long-term brand effects on par with, or greater than TV advertising.
Radio ads that make listeners feel more positive drive consumer behaviour change and deliver longer-lasting brand effects.
Well-branded radio advertising creates double the trust-building effects.
Right-brain audio creative features are more associated with listener memory and emotion than left-brain features.
Plus, get access to:
Newly defined right- and left-brain creative features for audio advertising, from Andrew Tindall, drawing from Orlando Wood’s research with the IPA.
Case studies and examples from brands excelling at radio advertising to inspire your next campaign.
Listen Up! is a joint research project with Radiocentre – the voice of commercial radio.
Test Your Ad Audio determines the short- and long-term impact of audio advertisements for radio, podcast and other platforms. You can test audio ads in draft or finished formats among the general population and custom audiences. Get access to your ad’s FaceTrace(R), a cumulative second-by-second emotional journey based on listeners’ responses, left and right-brain features, types of happiness, reasons for emotion and more!
Listen Up! is a research report from System1, The Creative Effectiveness Platform, and Radiocentre, the UK’s industry body for commercial radio. It is the first study to define left- and right-brain creative features specifically for audio advertising, building on Orlando Wood’s IPA publications Lemon (2019) and Look Out (2021).
The research combines in-market brand effectiveness data with human emotional data collected from over 50,000 radio listeners and non-listeners across 10 years, to show advertisers how to create audio advertising that stirs the passions and drives business profits.
Methodology
The report analyzed 131 radio ads across 13 categories, including FMCG, retail, automotive, finance and travel, measured using System1’s Test Your Ad platform and Radiocentre’s Radiogauge campaign effectiveness measurement service.
System1’s Test Your Ad platform measures emotional response to an ad and produces three key effectiveness metrics: Star Rating (potential to contribute to long-term brand growth, 1–5 stars), Spike Rating (potential to drive short-term activity such as sales or donations), and Fluency Rating (percentage of listeners able to correctly link the ad to the brand). Test Your Ad has been used to test over 100,000 ads and has been validated in experiments with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).
Radiogauge, launched in 2008, is Radiocentre’s free radio campaign effectiveness measurement service. It compares ad awareness, brand perceptions, purchase consideration and claimed response between commercial radio listeners and matched non-listeners, scored against Radiocentre’s proprietary 5’i’s creative evaluation framework (Involvement, Identity, Impression, Information, Integration). Since 2008 it has measured over 1,000 UK radio campaigns, making it the largest radio creative-effectiveness database in the world.
Do Emotionally Positive Radio Ads Really Change Consumer Behavior?
Yes. Radio ads that leave listeners feeling more positive, as measured by System1’s Star Rating, drive significantly more consumer action. Campaigns with an above-average Star Rating saw an 8.2% greater uplift in claimed consumer action (website visits, app downloads, brand searches, store visits, and purchasing/using brands) compared with below-average Star Rating campaigns.
Higher Star Rating ads also tend to achieve above-average Spike Ratings (short-term activation potential) — of ads in the top Star Rating band, 83% also had above-average Spike Ratings, compared with just 28% of ads in the bottom band. In other words, focusing on long-term brand-building creative tends to take care of short-term sales potential too.
Can Feel-Good Audio Ads Make a Campaign More Famous?
Yes. Ads that create more positive emotion see significantly larger uplifts in Word of Mouth and Sharing on Social. Campaigns with an above-average Star Rating saw a 4.9% greater uplift in Word of Mouth and a 6.3% greater uplift in Sharing on Social than below-average Star Rating campaigns.
Positive-emotion ads also make media spend work harder: 18.9% of listeners claimed to have heard a higher-than-average Star Rating campaign “a few times or a lot,” compared with 13.6% for lower-than-average Star Rating campaigns, a 5.3% uplift in perceived heavy ad exposure, even after weighting for actual media spend.
Is Radio as Effective as TV Advertising?
Radio is just as likely to cause long-lasting brand effects through emotional response as TV. System1’s database shows the average Star Rating for UK radio ads is 2.4, identical to the UK TV average of 2.4.
Radio ads are also nearly as well branded as TV, with an average Fluency Rating of 82 versus 83 for TV. The one gap is short-term effectiveness: radio’s average Spike Rating (1.01) trails TV’s (1.13), largely because the radio ads analyzed elicited slightly lower average emotional intensity (1.00 vs 1.15 for TV). The report’s best-practice recommendations are designed to help close this gap.
Does Well-Branded Radio Advertising Build More Trust?
Yes. Radio is the UK’s most trusted news medium. 77% of people trust national news stories from radio, ahead of TV (74%), print newspapers (48%), newspaper websites (45%) and social media (15%).
At a campaign level, well-branded (high-Fluency) radio ads build significantly more brand trust. Ads with an above-average Fluency Rating saw a 14.1% increase in brand trust, more than double the 7.3% increase seen for below-average Fluency ads, a 2x uplift. Campaigns that include radio in the media mix also see far larger increases in brand trust than those that don’t (16% vs 4% reporting very large brand-trust effects).
What Drives Short-Term Effectiveness in Audio Advertising?
Short-term effectiveness is driven by System1’s Spike Rating, a blend of emotional intensity (of any kind, not just positive) and speed of brand recognition. The report found a strong, statistically significant positive relationship (R=+0.42) between Spike Rating and increases in advertising awareness.
Ensuring rapid brand recognition, bringing in distinctive audio brand assets within the first 2 seconds, combined with an intense emotional response drives stronger short-term effects and helps counter the erosion of brand salience from time and competitor advertising. In a case study with Camelot’s National Lottery brand, higher Spike Ratings were strongly correlated (R=+0.84) with greater same-week radio ROI on ticket sales.
What Are Left-Brain and Right-Brain Creative Features in Audio Advertising?
Building on Orlando Wood’s work with the IPA, Listen Up! defines, for the first time, 20 left- and right-brain creative features specifically for audio advertising.
Right-brain features (associated with broad-beam attention and better long-term effectiveness) include: characters with vitality, story unfolding, clear sense of place, sotto voce and the pause (dramatic intimacy), unexpected contextual noise, sounds of the living, dialogue, playing with words, distinctive accents, and music with discernible melody.
Left-brain features (associated with narrow-beam attention, aimed at in-market buyers) include: unilateral communication (including testimonials), commanded action/calls to action, audio repetition, comparisons and claims, data and figures, abstracted product or service features, technical language (heavy Ts&Cs), strong product focus, flatness/lack of audio depth, and highly rhythmic music.
Do Right-Brain Creative Features Actually Improve Long-Term Effectiveness?
Yes, significantly. There is a strong positive relationship (R=+0.47) between the number of right-brain features in an audio ad and its Star Rating, and a strong negative relationship (R=-0.44) between the number of left-brain features and Star Rating (both significant at the 99% confidence interval).
Combining the two into a “right-brain skew” score (right-brain features minus left-brain features) produces an even stronger relationship with Star Rating (R=+0.55). Advertisers aiming for lasting brand effects should build audio ads with more right-brain features and fewer left-brain features.
What Are the Six Key Take-Outs from the Report?
Audio ads that make listeners feel more positive dramatically change consumer behavior and deliver longer-lasting brand effects (+8.2% more consumer action for high Star Rating radio ads).
Feel-good audio ads make advertising campaigns more famous, driving larger uplifts in Word of Mouth and Social Sharing (+5.3% more perceived heavy ad exposure).
Radio is as likely to cause long-lasting effects through emotional response as TV advertising (average Star Rating of 2.4 for both).
Well-branded (fluent) radio advertising creates bigger trust effects (2x more trust effects for high-Fluency radio ads).
Optimized audio adverts are effective at attracting attention and forming strong memories, increasing short-term effects (R=+0.42 correlation between Spike Rating and advertising awareness change).
Audio ads with more right-brain features are more likely to cause longer-lasting brand effects (20 left- and right-brain audio creative features identified in total).
What Best-Practice Recommendations Does the Report Give for Creating Audio Ads?
The report sets out six practical recommendations for marketers:
Incorporate more right-brained creative features, such as characters, sense of place, story unfolding, dramatic intimacy and music with discernible melody.
Create with the listener in mind. Make it clear who the ad is for, build in a customer insight or a problem the brand solves, and keep terms and conditions to a minimum.
Don’t zig, zag zag zag. Stay distinctive to your own brand rather than following category norms, to earn more attention and emotional intensity.
Embrace the power of music, particularly music with a discernible melody, which increases engagement and emotional intensity more than highly rhythmic soundtracks.
Be consistent and leverage a recognizable strapline, and keep audio executions aligned with TV and digital creative to extend campaigns and strengthen memory structures.
Brand early and often to benefit from trust effects. Introduce distinctive audio assets ideally within the first 2 seconds and maintain fluency throughout the ad.
Which Brands Are Highlighted as Audio Advertising Star Performers?
The report’s appendix features full case studies on brands putting these best practices into action, including: Compare the Market (character-driven storytelling with its meerkat fluent devices), The AA (music and fame effects via “Proud Mary”), Tesco (early branding and purpose-led messaging, 97 Fluency Rating), The National Lottery (sonic branding and emotional intensity via a celebrity voiceover), Cazoo (branded, melodic music driving short-term activation), Magnum (distinctive sonic branding and classical music), Warburtons (character and dramatic intimacy through its Jonathan’s Voicemail series), Weetabix (right-brain storytelling in “Built in Rome”), McDonald’s (sense of place and storytelling in “Guided Tour”), Moonpig (sonic branding in place of its non-speaking TV mascot), and Specsavers (humor and storytelling in its audiology creative).
How Was This Research Produced and by Whom?
Listen Up! was authored by Andrew Tindall (System1) in partnership with Orlando Wood, Chief Creative Officer at System1, and Matt Payton, CEO of Radiocentre. It combines System1’s Test Your Ad emotional-response methodology with Radiocentre’s Radiogauge in-market effectiveness data, drawing on 10 years of data from over 50,000 radio listeners and non-listeners.
FANCY A CLOSER LOOK?
Request a demo with one of our experts
Complete the form to book your demo.
Discuss your use cases and business needs
Our expert will give a hands-on demonstration of the platform
We’ll show how deep consumer insights can guide your marketing strategy
