Hot List October 29, 2018
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Halloween
Bohemian Rhapsody
NFL Week #8
College Football
Powerball
The Caravan
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Dumb, silly, fun bits are always remembered. Here’s a new feature for the show you can do on occasion called “We Know Your Dog’s Name”. Listeners call, give you the breed, age, and gender of their dog and you guess its name. The running joke is that you walk in hyper-confident with each caller and never, ever guess one correctly.
We love when family members (especially funny ones) are included in the show. They have an immensely humanizing effect on the cast member and are a very efficient way to do character development. Two Men and a Mom, MIX 101.5 (WRAL-FM), Raleigh leverage family members in a terrific way. Bryan Lord’s father was having a birthday and is a freak for Barry Manlow (a quirky, memorable trait). Bryan has a unique relationship with his dad so he purchased and sent from Amazon an autographed Manilow picture, and made his father open the package on-the-air without knowing what’s in it. They hid the surprise so they’d get a natural reaction, which was followed by a story (a concert memory). I leave the break getting a glimpse into the fun relationship Bryan has with his father, felt like I was a part of the reveal, and laughed. Listeners are drawn to humanity and things that are real. This serves both goals and is memorable and strategic as a result.
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Sometime the most fun and authentic breaks and ideas come from the experiences of the talent on the show. Anna of Anna and Raven, Star 99.9, Bridgeport, CT is pregnant…check that, she’s very pregnant. And anyone who’s been around women about to give birth know it’s a journey that requires many guys to sit quietly and count to ten before reacting. In her final trimester, the team does a regular Monday feature called “What Made Anna Cry This Weekend?” Here’s an example – note the fun, relatability, and very short produced piece which sets the tone. Then all Anna has to do is cull from her weekend and share with the audience all of the absurd, smallish things which made her weep. This show is all about relationships. Listen to this simple break and note how you think both men and women are reacting to the content. Women are connecting, knowing it’s all true, and men are nodding up and down as they know this is their life, too.
With Halloween and the opening of the Queen movie next week, it might be fun to bring a few kids in the studio and make them up as Freddie Mercury for the holiday.
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What might be fun is to find a few creatives in the audience and give them the task of carving a very famous celebrity into a pumpkin. Then closer to Halloween, they bring the pumpkins in and let listeners decide on social media who carved it best (for this idea, have every carver do the same celebrity).
We preach to all shows that it’s what you do with a topic that makes it resonate. Your imagination gets you noticed, Enter the tooth fairy on Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston! Karson’s young son Barrett called the hotline one morning to tell his father that he knew it was him who took his lost tooth and left five dollars under the pillow that morning instead of the tooth fairy. Both Barrett and Karson’s wife, Lana, were trapped, not knowing what to do. Here’s where their imagination took over. They aired the call, then, magically, the tooth fairy was listening and they deployed her to call Barrett back to cover for them. The tooth fairy knew all about Barrett’s room (geez, I wonder how!) and to tell him that she asked his father to cover because she’d been very busy. Never a wacky radio bit, this came from real life. It’s totally relatable, story-based, true, with a touch of imagination to capture the attention of the audience and make it memorable. What you do with the topic you choose is paramount to doing distinctive radio that you will own.
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