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Every iconic Super Bowl commercial for the last fifty years can be found online. Grab the biggest, most memorable ones and edit out the name of the product (if in the commercial). Through the week leading up to Sunday’s game, play one and see if your audience can remember what product it was for.
The biggest, boldest content you can do is something fun around something local. Live, local, and funny is the ultimate content, in fact. With the Broncos in the Super Bowl, Ryno and Tracy, KYGO, Denver have done a few things which are bulls eyes when it comes to sticky breaks around the highest relevant content of the moment. You’ll hear two examples below. One is the “Peyton Prayer” which has been done all season. In this weekly feature, a member of the clergy issues a prayer for the team. As you’ll hear, the goal is NOT to do religion, but use the vehicle to create humor. It’ll be quite obvious how this is done once you listen to it. The other is the “Broncos Roll”, a short, custom made song to support the team. In the latter example, music-based ideas really resonate with the audience. This fun song is their rallying cry of support for the team.
We always preach that the prize doesn’t get you the true win in a game or station contest, but the way you give it out. Amanda and Jesse, B105, Cincinnati, had Rascal Flatts tickets to give out. With the group coming to town for a concert, just taking caller ten on their fun afternoon show would have been blah, blah, blah to the audience. So they came up with a game called “Rascal Cats” where they replaced a word in a Rascal Flatts song with a cat screeching. This works for a few reasons: it’s vicarious (it gets passive listeners to play along) and those who have no interest in winning are laughing because of the twist.
Listeners like to chime in on dilemmas that face the show. A cast member tells the audience that their spouse wants to have a Super Bowl party in a couple of weeks but that they don’t want to. The cast member then says that they told their partner they will but want to tell the invitees that it’ll be a half of a Super Bowl party. Basically telling those who come that they’ll need to leave at (or after) halftime. The audience can share if this is appropriate and you can even find an etiquette expert who can comment on it, too.
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Rob and Joss, Froggy 92.9, Santa Rosa, CA, do a weekly feature that’s very strategic to developing the characters of their on-air cast called “Know the Show”. It’s an old feature that’s been done several different ways. They get one listener on and say one sentence that applies to a show member (i.e. this person graduated from Berkley, this person’s parents live in Canada, this character just got a dog). The listener must match up the sentence with the person. Do this feature and you’ll know how much the caller has retained about the personal stories you’ve told on-the-air.
Seizing the moment in pop culture extends past your content breaks so being about the topics of the day permeates everything you do. Detroit has a huge Muslim population. Mojo in the Morning, Channel 95.5, Detroit, excels at taking whatever is in the pop culture or news churn on any given day and owning it with their brand of innovation. The team had several liners cut by Eric Harthen, a great voice actor. Their audience knows it really isn’t Donald Trump voicing the lines – this is part of Mojo’s appeal – but they use Trump’s pronouncement to ban Muslims from entering the country to connect with and (important) entertain the audience with sweepers used to position the show as very contemporary and fun.
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Bet you have no idea what it’s like to win Powerball, right? With no winner this week and the jackpot now at an estimated $1.3-billion, do a Google search for people who’ve won large sums of money in the lottery and get them to tell their story of how their lives changed (good and bad) because of it.
