Brian and Chrissy, WGNA, Albany, Valen-Rhymes

Brian and Chrissy, WGNA, Albany did something fun and different for Valentine’s Day last month.  With a mission to be super local, the team partnered with a country artist who lives in town and got him to do custom Valentine’s Day songs for listeners as gifts for their significant others.  The effort happened on several levels – getting to know the couple the song was being written for, customizing the song, then getting the local artist to record the Valen-Rhyme, which was presented to them.  This works because it was topical and different.  Then it scored its biggest points being local and fun to hear. We often do things in radio and play with whatever is presented to us at that time (i.e. a phone topic where we only get to use whatever is called in at that moment).  Brian and Chrissy seized control of this idea, orchestrating the listener calls prior to the holiday, gathering the info to write the songs, then penning them with the local artist, who recorded them.  The audience would have never known, nor would they have cared.  Listeners just want relevant content that is entertaining.  That they put these elements in place to create memorable content for the holiday helped craft and present breaks to their fans they’d laugh at and come back for more of the show’s brand of fun the next day.

The Betty White Game

Betty White just turned 99 and is iconic.  In this game, the caller has to decide which is older, Betty White or the odd item you’d find in the grocery store.  For example, which is older – Betty White or Hostess Twinkies?  Believe it or not, Betty is older by eight years.  Betty is 99.  Twinkies were introduced in 1930, making them 91!

Hey NAB – Steal This Slogan!

Set aside what you or I might think of what Rush Limbaugh offered his 15-million listeners each week, we should laud him for what he taught us the last three decades:  that our win comes from compelling talent and the content they offer fans.

When radio was investing millions of dollars in “AM stereo” (remember that nonsense?), Rush resurrected radio stations left for dead because he was bold, different, irreverent, relevant, and fun.  They didn’t care that he was on AM!  While I’ll leave any reflection for another blog on where we’d be had we invested that money in developing talent, Rush was connective in a way few have, and reminds us that it’s not just your music mix of Today’s-Best-Variety-Hot-County-Relaxing-Favorites that gives you a lift to #1, it’s your people.

Peggy Noonan said in the Wall Street Journal this week that Rush “created a community – an actual community of, at his height, tens of millions of people who thought along with him every day and through that thinking came to feel less like outsiders in their views.”

That’s what we do each day with our talent.  They are the face of your brand.  In a world of loneliness that few will admit, made even more challenging by the pandemic, talent (real human beings on your radio station) reach out and touch listeners’ hearts and souls, and make them feel less lonely.

This should be the slogan the NAB uses when extolling the benefits of radio to listeners and advertisers:  Radio – We Make You Feel Less Lonely.

Our greatest strength is that intimacy.  It’s our ability to have a presence on-air and do content that is the ultimate #metoo for people who think they are by themselves.  One listener tunes in and understands they do have a friend, the person they’re listening to on the radio.  That’s the Power of Personalities.

This is why I coach the talent I work with to share those parts of their life that prove to the audience they are just like them – to be honest, genuine, and real – because that’s what works.  From their sense of humor or a shared sense of compassion, the audience wants to know they aren’t alone, and that the people on the radio will always root for them – then they will root for us back with their continued listening.

We do this by understanding the audience, their life and lifestyle, but also with what is going on emotionally in their world, then connecting that to what is going on emotionally in ours.

A shared vulnerability allows for a terrific relationship, much like you or I have in our personal lives, where we want to be around each other more often.  If we develop and nurture a relationship with listeners this way, they’ll become fans.

I never really connected with Rush’s content, but I was always aware of him because of it.  There were millions who left saying, “this guy speaks for me”.

Listen to your talent through this prism for a few days.  How can you coach them to level up so they, too, create bigger communities of fans that feel less like outsiders in a world where so many feel as though they are on an island?

We burned millions of dollars trying to make AM radio have parity with the sound of FM many years ago.  Rush proved we were focused on the wrong thing.  The answer to our ills was staring us in the face all along:  have great people on-the-air, who do the right content, and listeners will get addicted.

Can we make investments moving forward to help our personalities get even better so they get even bigger?  So listeners won’t feel alone?  Our talent are our boldest point-of-differentiation.  Do that, and our ratings and revenue issues will fix themselves.

WRAL, Raleigh MIX Morning Show Real Life WINOS

We offered a Free Idea last week called WINOS.  As Rush Limbaugh taught us years ago, putting together tribes in your audience gives them power to not feel like they are alone in this world.  Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL, Raleigh seized the idea, which is an acronym for Women In Need of Sanity.  Their target is a 35-year old female who’s going crazy after one year of Covid.  Sarah from the show will lead the group, then over the course of the next few weeks, build out the tribe by taking calls from women who have this in common with her and the others who want in.  There’s power in the group.  There is also humor as this week’s audio proves.  This is where your win actually happens.  Listen to not only the real life offerings from this nurse, but how deft the show is at allowing her to be the star of the break, maximizing her observations and sense of humor.  We all know shows that would be uncomfortable allowing the caller to be the center of the break, even trying to top the lines.  Not here and not with this team.  The show is elevated because they elevate the caller.  WINOS starts a new idea for the program, a tribe for the audience, and more genuine humor coming from listeners who feel comfortable to call the show to have fun.

The Morning Show Mystery Question

Ask those who have listened to your show for some time to call because you have a Morning Show Mystery Question to ask.  Once on (or once you’re recording them), ask if they feel like they know you well enough that they will trust you with a password to one of their accounts.  The fun comes in the silence you’ll hear before they say no!

Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston Karson Has a Family Meeting

A misstep for some shows is to try too hard to impress the audience.  Real life talk works and does best when it’s grounded in truth and based in story-telling.  With the recent snowfall in New England, Karson, from Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston, decided it was time for his ten-year old son to start shoveling the driveway.  An important marker to decide if a real life story should be shared on the air is if there is a better than fair chance listeners have experienced the same thing or could see themselves in that scenario.  The center of this story is how much young Barrett should be paid for that task.  Instead of just telling the story and opening the phones, Karson decided to call for a family meeting to discuss the dilemma during dinner.  What is in our hands is how we offer the content to the audience.  In this break, you feel as though you are not only relating to the topic, but sitting at the kitchen table while the family eats, discussing things.  The topic works well, the presentation of the audio helps advance its memorability.

WINOS

This week’s idea is to form a new group called WINOS:  Women In Need of Sanity.  Set up a special phone line only for women – invite them to call and vent about their life or their kids.  Air the most passionate calls and then give them admittance to the WINOS group for the rest of eternity.

Roses Are Red

With Valentine’s Day this Sunday, ask listeners to write some love poems.  Choose a different topic each time you do it (i.e. Covid, the Super Bowl, GameStop, Tom Brady, Bernie Sander’s Mittens).  The only thing they need to do is use as a first line: Roses Are Red.  They then follow the expected path of that poem we all know.  Thanks to Lexi from Lexi and Banks, K-BULL 93, Salt Lake City for this great idea.

John and Tammy, KSON, San Diego Take It or Toss It

One thing that makes powerful talent powerful is they’ve moved the audience to care about them.  The intimacy of our medium (it’s just you and that one listener, as we learned years ago) flows from a very deep relationship.  Built on vulnerability and the sharing of your life with listeners, the more you let them in and prove you are like them, the more that connection happens.  You have the power to make people care not only based on what you share, but how you share it.  At John and Tammy, KSON, San Diego, John has been abruptly forced out of his apartment because the landlord sold the house.  On its face, you could think:  how do I make them care about my problem? Emotion, and more specifically humor, moves them into the “care column”.  John has accumulated lots of stuff as we all do (very relatable) and must decide what to take to his new place.  The X-factor in this break is the show asking the listener who joined to decide if the item John references should make the move.  The feature they did was called Take It or Toss It and the ruling made by the caller was final.  That John has to move is his problem.  That they figured out how to use a listener in a fun way made it sticky, thus moving the audience to get to know him and care about him.

Steve Reynolds For the Entire Hour On the Next Larry King Live

I can relive the memory like it was yesterday, despite happening in 1998.  Larry King invited me on his CNN show to talk about talent coaching.  We’re cooking along with Larry being his inquisitive self when he took a commercial break.

“Welcome back to Larry King Live.  Our guest tomorrow is Quincy himself, Jack Klugman.  A few celebrity birthdays before we continue with talent coach extraordinaire Steve Reynolds.  Carol Channing is 84 today.  Happy birthday to the Flying Nun, Sally Field, who celebrates her 72nd.  Famed game show host Gene Rayburn turns 81.  Batman Christian Bale is 47 today!”

Larry must’ve read my body language because, when he pivoted back to me as his guest, he asked why I recoiled.  It’s then I shared with Larry that no one really cares about celebrity birthdays.  Whether they’re dead or alive.  I suggested that, as content, this was a list with information and absolutely nothing about it is engaging.

There were audible gasps from the floor crew.

Larry pushed back further, saying he always read the list of birthdays when he did overnights on WIOD-AM, Miami.  He claimed that everywhere he went people talked to him about it.  I demurred, telling Larry we need to be better than that with our content selection.  Maybe this worked in 1966.  Today, not so much.

With that one, short exchange, Larry abruptly went to another commercial break.  As I watched an ad for Depends play on the studio monitors, I was quickly whisked from the set.  Larry called Jack Klugman to get his take on what I had just offered and asked that he tease this week’s Odd Couple and his appearance that next night to fill the rest of my hour.  I was limo’d back to the Fairfax, Virginia La Quinta Inn.

Nothing above this sentence is true.  I made up the entire story.  I’ve never appeared on Larry King Live, although I did see him in person at one of Joel Denver’s WWRS conventions and thought he was shorter than I would have imagined.  The picture above was doctored, too, for humor purposes by my friend Kris Rochester, who does mornings at WIVK, Knoxville.

Some people wish for their professional legacy to find a cure for cancer or to develop time travel.  Others work for world peace or to end child starvation.

My legacy in radio?  To rid shows of irrelevant features like reading a list of birthdays (whether they’re famous or local – because no one cares that Timmy Smith in your market is six today, except his grandparents, who may or may not be listening).

I also wish to nix content breaks like This Date in History and telling the audience things like it’s National Doughnut Day.  I scream at the radio every single time I hear something like this.  There is no strategic benefit to the show doing content this weak.

We are better than that to connect with and entertain the audience.  I challenge all of us to reach higher when deciding content choices.

The audience comes for content.  And every single thing coming out of those speakers to them is content.  They are evaluating all of it:  is this of interest to me?  Does this matter to my life?  Am I being entertained?

What’s strong content?  These three always work:  whatever is going on now in the news/pop culture (remember, pop = popular), stories about your life so the audience can get to know you and see you are just like them, and stuff happening locally.

All three of those have a strategic win to position the show as relevant and local and the talent as real and relatable.

Your show might not be dabbling in these specific features noted above, but evaluate all of your content choices:  are they substantive?  Do they reflect the moment and connect you back to the audience?  Are they interesting to them?  Do you gain an important image from their choice?  Do they fit and matter to building your brand?

The only birthday that really matters is mine and I hope next November 6th to tune into dozens of radio shows and hear every one wishing me well.  See, you don’t care, do you?

It’s to be seen which will happen first:  that cure for cancer or my ridding radio of stuff like this.  We need to encourage shows still doing irrelevant content like birthdays to level up.  Because being relatable and real and doing epic stuff with it is the only way we’re going to make more listeners passionate for what we do.

Let’s let someone else worry about world peace.  I need fellow warriors who’ll help me take on things like celebrity birthdays.

Can I count on you?