Imagine hiring a painter to paint the exterior of your 3,000 square-foot home. The job requires 20 gallons of paint—10 for the first coat and 10 for the second. The painter agrees, the paint is purchased, and you’re expecting a beautiful, finished result. Now, imagine if halfway through the job, you tell the painter you want to cut the paint order down to 16 gallons to save money. The painter warns you that 16 gallons won’t cover the house properly, but you insist. The result? An unfinished or uneven paint job—and a disappointed homeowner.
This is exactly what happens when a home services contractor cuts their commercial schedule from what’s needed to what they think they can afford. If it takes 87 radio or TV ads to “paint” your audience with enough frequency to make your message stick, and you trim that to 67, you’ve left the job undone. You’ve invested money, but you won’t see the full benefit, because the audience hasn’t been fully covered.
Let’s do the math. A typical radio station runs about 17 commercials per hour. That’s 204 commercials between 6 AM and 6 PM (12 hours). In that time, your ad is fighting for attention against more than 200 others every single day. If your ad only runs 2 or 3 times a day, do you think the average listener—or even your ideal customer—remembers it? Highly unlikely.
Advertising, like painting, depends on complete coverage. You wouldn’t buy a quarter-page ad and expect full-page results. Likewise, you shouldn’t underinvest in your radio or TV schedule and expect full campaign impact. In broadcast advertising, frequency is everything. It’s the second coat. It’s the repetition that cements your brand in the listener’s mind.
But frequency alone won’t save you. Just like bad paint won’t look good even if applied in the right amount, a poorly crafted ad won’t deliver results. If your message is stuffed with overused clichés—“family-owned,” “best in town,” “quality you can trust”—your audience won’t even hear you. These phrases are so common that the brain filters them out like wallpaper. You sound just like everyone else, and in doing so, you become invisible.
And let’s not forget placement. Even the best ad with the right frequency can fail if it’s on the wrong station. If you’re a high-end pool builder and you’re advertising on a station whose audience can’t afford luxury purchases, you’re wasting your money. The right message, on the right station, with the right number of ads—that’s the full paint job.
At the end of the day, showing up means more than “being on the air.” It means being on the air enough. It means being heard enough. And it means saying something worth hearing. You wouldn’t leave your house half-painted. Don’t leave your campaign half-done. Spend wisely, but spend fully—or don’t spend at all.
