Motel 6’s ad campaign has won best radio ad of the year again at the Radio Mercury Awards. Check it out, listen, and enjoy! You can also listen to the other finalists here.
Title: 2017 Motel 6 Radio Campaign
Client: Motel 6
Agency: The Richards Group
Writers: Rachel Dawer, Steve Grimes
Producers: Katie Snyder, Sheri Cartwright
Creative Director: Chris Smith
Engineer: Glenn Ferguson
Production Company: Post-Op
Talent: Tom Bodett
Via Adweek:
Among long-running advertising campaigns, few are as charming as Motel 6’s radio work featuring Tom Bodett as the folksy voice who promises that the motel will “leave the light on for ya.”
The campaign—which BBDO’s Robin Fitzgerald picks as one of her three favorites in our new “Best Ads Ever” video, above—has been running for a staggering 31 years. It was way back in 1986 that David Fowler, a creative director at The Richards Group in Dallas, heard Bodett talking on NPR’s All Things Considered (he had a gig as a humorist on the show, while making a living building houses in Alaska) and signed him up for the Motel 6 campaign.
The rest is history. “I didn’t expect to be doing it 17 months later,” Bodett told Adweek in 2003, when the campaign was 17 years old. “I think everyone will know when it’s over, but it never seems to be over.”
It still isn’t. And in fact, the latest execution shows how far it’s come and yet how little it’s changed—in it, Bodett riffs about millennials, yet the structure remains basically the same as it’s ever been.