Hurricane Irene
Back to School
Madden 2012
NYC Mass Transit
Steve Jobs
MTV’s VMAs
NFL Pre-Season
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dick Cheney
Labor Day
Three-Day Weekend
College Football
Will and Jada Smith
Mel Gibson
Jerry Lewis
Kim Kardashian
9/11
Dancing With the Stars
Jersey Shore
Billy Ray Cyrus
Brad Pitt
Jim Carrey
Derek Jeter
Chaz Bono
Sara Gilbert
Rihanna
Paul McCartney recently played in Chicago. Here’s a call Eddie and Jobo, on KHITS, Chicago, got from a male listener who’d gone to the concert the previous night with his son. Seems like the son didn’t come home, and the father speculated that he’d been picked up by a cougar at the concert. The team did the most logical thing. They teased the listeners into the next quarter hour that they’d call the kid’s cell to see if he or the courgar would pick up. This is a great way to extend listenership through two quarter hours of a program. You might be surprised what happens. Here are both segments.
Labor Day Weekend is almost here. How about finding five women who are due to give birth over the weekend. Get to know them and their husbands throughout this week. The first mom to give birth over the weekend wins a prize. You can have all of them on your Tuesday show (the day after the holiday) for an update! You can call this “Labor Day, Labor Day”.
With the stock market in turmoil, go grab three cute school kids, give them each $100, and marry them up with a financial trader in your market. Introduce the teams to the audience on a Monday. Tell each team they must day trade for one week (they have to buy/sell at least one stock each day). Check in with them daily. Whatever money the kids have left the following Monday they get to keep for school clothes and supplies.
Kyle and Rachel at Radio Now, Indianapolis, do this fun, interactive thing with listeners on occasion called “I Don’t Believe You”. Listeners call, give a one sentence story about something they may have experienced in life, and the morning show has to determine if it’s believable. Most stories told are true, so they get the details and entertain the audience in the process. It’s just another fun way to get listeners participating in the show around a vicarious feature.
How about a couple of back to school ideas? Want to really connect with moms? Open the phones and ask moms to call and read you the list of things they have to buy their kid as they get ready to go back to the classroom. Take one and edit it in such a way that you “take breaks” from hearing her list to play music or commercials, then return to her in between those elements for a half hour so it sounds like the list has 1000 things on it! Another idea is to find one mom with a list and get the person at your local newspaper who covers how to save money by coupons and figure out how she can save tons of cash on her list.
Great games have a vicarious aspect to them which allow people listening to play along. Here’s J & Julian, on B96, Chicago, doing “Pregnant, Pissed, or Happy”. This is where they put a female listener on the air, ask her questions unrelated to any of the three conditions, then, based on her voice, try to determine if she’s pregnant, upset with something, or happy today. If she stumps them, she gets a prize – and all listening are playing along trying to figure it out, too.