'This is for Tina – I'm sorry I stabbed you.'

That was the request of a caller that phoned in to a New York radio station. Now if a request like that doesn't grab your attention, I'm not exactly sure what will. What I do know is that no matter how absurd it sounds to you and me, with that one sentence, this guy who is obviously a bit detached from standard protocol has given you and me the right insight into the medium of radio.

I'd be lying if I said that writing for radio is easy. It's not. When I read Luke Sullivan's words, 'Radio is hell. But it's a dry kind of heat' in his book, 'Hey Whipple Squeeze This', I for a moment thought the guy was just using some classic scare tactics. Turns out he's right.

The following radio ad was done by TBWA Hunt Lascaris/Johannesburg. It was a 2002 Clio – Finalist and was written by Copywriters: Avital Pinchevsky and Peter Houry for BIC Lighters.

FVO: (Afrikaans accent, dramatic) So it was mine and Frikkie's 3^rd montheversary and I wanted to cook him a special dinner and the ladies at work all told me to make a duck Flambé – that's when you set the duck on fire - (mad horse laugh) and then Frikkie arrived with some biltong for me from the garage, he's so romantic my Frikkie and I was about to light the duck but I was so excited about the biltong that I dropped the matches in the sink and they got wet.

I was in a very ugly place then because dinner could have been ruined but Frikkie said: 'Poppie, just use my Bic lighter. It lights first time every time and it's now SABS approved' and I thought to myself, what a man.

So dinner was rescued and Frikkie took the next step and asked me to be more than his cousin, but also his wife. Lucky, hey?

ANNCR: Bic Lighters. Even if nobody's home, the light will come on.

I like this ad. It's fun, entertaining, lighthearted and endearing. All in all, a memorable story. There isn't an earth shatteringly great concept in it I suppose, it has a proposition, 'BIC Lighters lights the first time every time', and a bit of an insight into Afrikaners and the way they speak, although I'm sure not all of them sound like this. For the sake of radio the character in this story was obviously exaggerated, kind of in a similar way you'll 'push' a benefit in print ads or TV commercials. The result is the same, it makes it stand out and that's exactly what you want.

While I'm busy contemplating all of this, that strange caller's request all of a sudden comes to mind again. It doesn't matter how you grab someone's attention, if you can get it and hold it with a clever concept, idea or interesting story, mate, you'll have listeners smiling all the way. All it takes is finding a story that will do that. Perhaps the power of radio is best explained with the words of Marilyn Monroe when she said: "It's not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on."