Fitz in the Morning, The Wolf, Seattle, does a fun character-building bit on Mondays called “The Peak and the Pit” where the cast shares the best and worst moments of their weekends (peaks/pits) and asks listeners to do the same. What is great about this is they’re short stories centered around highs and lows of real life over the weekend for all.
A terrific character building feature heard last week on The Bert Show is called “Let’s Be Honest”. Each cast member puts a highly personal question into a hat (think: “Which cast member on our team is the most irritating to be around off-air and why?”). Then, each cast member pulls out a question and must answer it for the audience. Conceivably, you could pull your own question! You score points with the listeners when you reveal yourself and you’re honest. This does that.
New features can magically appear if you listen to how people say things. On a listener call a few weeks ago on an unrelated topic, the caller was heard to say that they were a teacher’s kid. When the host asked him to repeat himself, what the listener actually said was that he was a preacher’s kid. Bam, a feature is born. A listener who is either a Teacher’s Kid or Preacher’s Kid calls to tell you about a wild thing they did once when there were young. Running through a few follow-up questions, you then guess if they are a teacher’s kid or a preacher’s kid. This works because it’s alliterative, what you hear is story-based, and the audience is playing right along emotionally.
Listeners always like to play along – if you do things that are vicarious, they’ll lean in, you will emotionally engage them, and you have them hooked for that break. Slacker and Steve, Alice 105.9, Denver, play a fun game with listeners. It’s called “Drunk or a Kid”. Listeners call and tell the show a story about something they did when they were either a drunk or a kid. The show then has to guess. The listeners will do that, too.
Some of the best ideas happen when you marry opposites. Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” video is now up to 60-million views on YouTube. It’s racy, over-the-top, and being talked about. This week’s Free Idea comes compliments of Kyle of Kyle and Rachel, Radio NOW, Indianapolis, who suggests you show the video to polite, courtly grandmothers to get their aural reaction as they watch it.
Sometimes the really fun ideas come out of a simple statement someone makes. My neighbor, talking about her three kids returning to school in the next week, said, “Kids go dumber over the summer.” So we have something for the show! Talk to moms with kids in the car headed off to a new school year. The kid comes on and tells you the grade they’re going into. Find out if the kid went dumber over the summer by asking them questions from the grade they graduated from a few months ago.
With county fairs about to start, Rob and Joss, Froggy 92.9, Santa Rosa, CA played a fun game with listeners. They went to their fair and talked with kids, just as they left a ride, and asked them to describe it for the audience, who then had to guess the name of the ride. What’s brilliant about this is that they got the kids at their emotional peak, just off a fun ride they went on, so you heard that in their voice.
We’re just days away from kids going back to school. Find the exact dates certain schools go back in session in your market. Then pick a morning and invite moms who drop their kids off at school to come to the station before heading to work for your first annual Botox Party. Give moms a shot of Botox for what they endured having their kids around all summer.
Seems like most people we know all have side jobs. A small thing they do in their spare time to earn a few extra hundred dollars a month. Might not be a bad idea to find out what these are by asking listeners about their “side hustles”.
In a conference call this past week, a morning show and I were talking about our summer vacations and, more specifically, airline travel. Each of us had a story to tell about how much we hate the airlines. That’s when we went in the opposite direction to develop an idea. Let’s let the airlines complain about us! This show happens to be in a market with two hubs (American Airlines and Southwest) so we have a large body of flight attendants and pilots who can tell their horror stories; the ones they tell their fellow airline employees about how bad we are. You don’t need that to do this. Generate great stories around the Hot Topic of summer vacations with this idea.