Magic 106.7, Boston Truth Be Told
Playing the occasional game on a show is a good thing. It’s even better when it has two elements: it’s vicarious (listeners can play along in the car as they’re driving to work) and it’s strategic (its purpose is to have fun, earn another critical image, and/or define the cast). There are many ways a cast can do character development, but the game Truth Be Told, as done by David, Sue, and Kendra, Magic 106.7, Boston, is the cleanest and most efficient we’ve heard. There are a few versions of this game (i.e. Two Lies and a Truth), but listen to how this team executes the game so fans driving (who just woke up and don’t have a great capacity to follow along with deep stories) can easy understand what they’re doing. Each cast member offers a one sentence story to the caller (one sentence is highly digestible), then the listener chooses which story is true (with people in cars doing the same). Then the fuller story is told – defining that cast member, earning the additional image of fun for listeners just tuning in to be put in a good mood.
One of my wishes for all of radio is that we dispense with boring, staged phone topics presented for use by prep services. The best phone topics come from stories the talent tell about their life, before they put the spotlight on the audience by asking them to tell similar stories about themselves. We talk about being relevant and strategic in radio. This approach to topics does a few important things: it defines the talent telling the story because it’s about them (must be relatable), then flips the script by allowing the audience to tell stories just like that to entertain the cast and other listeners. Tim, Claire, and Red, 98.9 The Bull, Seattle executed this perfectly in these two breaks below. Red tells a story about what she’s like shopping online when she is drunk (listen to the chemistry and natural laughter as her team pulls out all the details of the story). Then in the second clip, a listener calls to advance the narrative in their quest to do real life content that is fun to hear.
Who doesn’t live in a neighborhood where you have nicknames for those who live there? Mark and NeanderPaul, KSLX, Phoenix realized in an unplanned content break that everyone does this. Like the one resident of someone’s neighborhood who has been deemed, behind her back, as Amazon Woman. Not due to her size, but because UPS pulls up everyday and offloads several packages from Amazon to her home. This has become a weekly feature on their program where listeners call and share the nicknames of neighborhood residents, and then the reason they were given them. The very best content is real life stuff, culled not only from the experiences the cast and listeners have, but the kind of content the average listener might hear and say, “yea, me, too.” That’s content that is relatable and helps the show remind the audience that they are just like them.