Making Your Mess Your Message
Who’d have thought that a morning radio personality’s death would result in fans making a pilgrimage to his studios to leave notes, cards, and flowers? Yet, that’s what happened when Kidd Kraddick passed away unexpectedly in 2013.
One would only need to peruse Facebook comments to know why. Consistently you read things like “I felt like I knew you, Kidd” and “every morning it was just you, your team, and me in the car on the way to work.”
Kidd was one of the innovators of ensemble cast shows and was a pioneer in understanding that to win, talent had to share their life with the audience. Kidd easily surpassed the first threshold for any show to attain success and, dare I say, become iconic. Move the listener with your vulnerability and be so honest with them that they care about you. He knew that “making your mess your message” was the powerful way to cultivate an audience with an image of accessibility and likability.
While I am sure there were facets to Kidd’s life we never knew (there are to us all), he, along with his very talented team, put it all out there so listeners could connect.
An admission: I borrowed the title for this blog post from Robin Roberts, easily the most liked morning TV personality in America. She talks about making your mess your message in this interview. This should be required viewing for any show wishing to understand how to be successful.
Robin says it’s not good enough to be a great storyteller unless you can tell your story. We know near everything she’s endured, and it endears us to her—we feel like we know her. That drives Good Morning America’s growth and success.
I hear from managers who think listeners don’t want to know about the lives of the people on their morning show they wake up with. Bullshit. For the morning show to be successful, the team must be open, honest, and vulnerable about their lives. The listeners crave and demand it. That doesn’t mean everything can or should be shared, but it’s an imperative if you want the kinds of relationships Kidd had and Robin has.
Take an assessment of your morning program in this regard. Listen to the team for two straight mornings and make an honest judgment. Listen to see if they’re honest and if they shared those stories of their lives which moved the average listener to leave the break caring about them as people. That’s when you become iconic.
Need help getting your morning show team to open up and embrace vulnerability? Let’s chat.
There are simple ways to take the topic of sports and broaden it out to make it become a topic about relationships with a sports theme. With our entering football season, you might find natural team allegiances are split in relationships. Look for those inside a marriage and do a Spousal Sports Bet. This is where he supports one team and she supports another (and hopefully his rival). On the eve of that game, get both people in the relationship on and get them to make an odd bet (he wins: he doesn’t have to clean the kitchen for a week after dinner, she wins: he gives her two spa treatments). Focusing on the relationship allows you to talk about the game not from a position of X’s and O’s, but from how it impacts their relationship, which is quite relatable to everyone in your audience. And yes, if you want to do this with your relationship it would be character development, but make sure you choose fun listeners, too, which will give you more to play with. We did this at Koz and Jen, WTMX (101.9 The Mix), Chicago so you can hear the fun here.
There are some standard features most shows do that target female listeners (i.e. Teacher of the Week, etc.). Two Men and a Mom, WRAL-FM, Raleigh developed something different – a feature that celebrates the average listener and the challenges she has in her quest to get stuff done in her life. Each of us has the vibe of just trying to make it through each day. In the feature Lady Boss, the show seeks to do nothing more than highlight and celebrate regular female listeners who quietly accomplish successfully tackling their lives. There is nothing here that’s heroic or out of the ordinary (like most features of this nature). In this version posted below, they celebrate a female listener who figures out how to successfully be a mom to seven kids, We get relatable stories for other mothers to connect with and the show leverages their natural curiosity to poke around this listener’s story to prop her up as a Lady Boss.
When introducing a new cast member to the audience, it’s always most efficient and effective to do so with a regular feature the new person does – this will quickly define that talent and set their sense of humor for the audience. It should not be their only contribution to the show, but highlighting this one thing will help them. We recently added a new member to the team at The Big Dave Show, B105, Cincinnati. Wanting to cover off the younger end of the demo, we chose Ashley, who’d been working in the sales department, who electrified the halls. One of the ways in which we were not doing content was having fun with listeners on the streets. So we added Out With Ashley as the feature that could both give us content in that style, and showcase Ashley’s very quick laugh and sense of humor. She heads out on the streets (think Leno) to talk with Cincinnati residents about a variety of silly topics in a feature we’re calling Out With Ashley. In the episode below, Ashley is talking to a few hair stylists she knows in something we’re calling Salon Confidential, where they trade fun stories about clients.