Archive for category: Audio

On the show DJ Zog and Ivy Unleashed, Power 96, Miami, they’re always making fun that Ivy can’t remember the names of callers seconds after they introduce themselves.  For those of us with the disease PCB (Permanent Content Brain), we see breaks of character development in all of this!  We hatched this idea where listeners would come on, introduce themselves, and attach an interesting fact about their life to the audience and Ivy.  She then had to hold on to the fact and person’s name (no writing anything down) for 24-hours.  The next day at the same time, the callers came back on, reminded her of their interesting personal fact, to see if Ivy remembered their name.  Did she succeed?  Here’s the audio.

I have great respect for shows that take what could be standard, pro forma content, and twist it even slightly to make it more effective.  Summer is upon us and that brings back memories for many of summer flings.  Did you have one in your life?  You didn’t have to in order to relate to this topic.  Elizabeth and Radar, 99.1 The MIX, Milwaukee know the power of both nostalgia and storytelling.  They took calls from listeners who told them a story about a summer romance they once had.  At the end, they had to guess if the romance was a fling or forever.  What’s best is that twist – in the frame of the topic, listeners followed along and guessed in their minds, too.  Creating  content that listeners had to pay attention to because of how it was designed.

Relevance is when you’re on a topic of the moment.  Something happening now is high school graduations.  Marry that topic with an idea that would resonate with your demo, and it’s gold.  Anna and Raven, Star 99.9, Bridgeport, CT (syndicated) know their Hot AC audience is adult women, many of whom have high school students graduating this month.  Some of those graduates will go on to college, which can be quite expensive.  Which is why they did Scratch It for Your Graduate.  A listener came on to gush about their kid then talk about the university they were going to in the fall.  They had a bunch of lottery tickets in the studio!  They scratched a card and gave the caller whatever the winnings were to defray the cost of board and tuition for freshman year.  Clever and relevant.

Character development comes in various forms.  When you’re honest with the audience around a topic of high relevance and when you share a story about your life where someone connects with you.  There are many creative ways to do that.  Ornery Sal, Boston’s Best Boss is a regular contributor to Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston.  The team regularly uses him as a foil to do content.  This time, they brought him in to quiz how well he knows the cast members.  They gave him the traditional one to two sentence story, then Sal had to say which cast member experienced that.  He went four for five, proving he does know the show.  But having him to goof with while doing character development is a novel way to get things done and make character development content stickier.

Spirit Airlines went out of business last week.  Even if the airline isn’t in your market, it was a big story that needed to be touched on by everyone.  One of the thresholds to determine if a topic is viable is this – is everyone aware of the story?  They don’t have to be interested in it, they just need to be aware of it.  Familiarity drives our interest in things.  In the trajectory of Topic-Treatment-Tone (credit Coleman Insights), it’s what you do with the topic that makes it engaging and entertaining for the audience.  We are storytellers at our core.  Where lots of shows talked around that topic last week, Moug and Karla, B96, Chicago found two people directly impacted by it.  The first is a passenger who was caught during her travels trying to get to Orlando to photograph a wedding (she has audio of the overhead announcement of the flight being cancelled) and the other is a flight attendant who found out the airline was shutting down mid-flight from a company email.