Go get a bunch of $5 Starbucks gift cards, or if you can wrestle it from your brand manager, actual cash for a new feature called The $5 Story. Open the phones, take three callers. Each tells you a story. After you hear each, the team votes on the best and the winner gets the five dollars.
It’s really important to be topical. Being about the moment makes your show sound connected and relevant. Think of the nightly comedians. Minus political comedy (which doesn’t fit most radio shows), they create humor around whatever topics are hot right now. That’s a smart approach to prepping your show, too. The week of the Masters, Tony and Kris, WIVK, Knoxville decided the audience deserved to know who’d win before the iconic weekend golf tournament started. So they wrote the names of each golfer on a ball, dropped them down a flight of stairs, and whichever one their producer Cody grabbed first was predicted to be the winner. Think Topic-Treatment-Tone (as espoused by my friends at Coleman Insights). The topic was perfect, but the treatment (the idea) was meant to ramp up the laughter and talk. Here’s audio of the break. They did a companion video that was released on social media, too, to extend the life of the idea.
What’s fun is hearing listeners call themselves out when they’ve stumbled in life and done something stupid. Your show and its cast are elevated when you do the same with the audience; make them the star. That’s why it’s critical, even in these days when so much effort is put on social media engagement with your fans, that you continue to cultivate great story telling on the phones so listeners add to your program’s content. In this regular feature as done by Gregg, Freddy, and Danielle, MIX 104.1, Boston’s great afternoon show, they ask the audience to call with their oops moment and tell them a time they did something completely inane and left embarrassed by it. The show asks all the appropriate questions to create the fun.
Flex On Your Ex is a new feature where you take calls from people divorced or those who just broke up with someone and compel them to say something nice about the other person (hence “flex on your ex”). That tension in the bit is a fun thesis, but it really gives you an opening to explore the relationship and why it ended, which is the win.
My blog this week is Practice Makes Permanent. In it, I talk about the value of curiosity to get a more creative show. Surrounding yourself with curiosity always leads to more fun things to do around a topic. Case in point was what was done last week by Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh. The big topic in the Triangle was the Final Four match-up that weekend between Duke and UNC, two local teams. It’s all anyone talked about. In one of our Curiosity Zooms, when discussing the topic, someone noted that it’s always the next day in Australia. Which lead to our deciding to call a friend there the day before the game. They noted to him that, because it’s the next day, the game had already been played and asked who won (he said UNC). Many listeners got the joke, but a few didn’t, which resulted in one calling the show a little confused. Do fun and different things with your big topics and there’s no way you can’t stand out.
Lent ends this Thursday, April 14. Gather a bunch of people who gave up something and let them break Lent live on your show. They can utter their first curse word, snack on a delicious piece of chocolate or eat a potato chip, pop the top on a Diet Coke or sip a delicious cup of coffee for the first time in forty days on your program.
Many of us read in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, that it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of a complex skill.
Which brings me to show prep.
Back in the day, personality-driven shows could get away with winging it. No longer, though. The audience’s expectations, along with their A.D.D., won’t allow any show, new or tenured, to make it up as they go along.
I was asked recently to talk with some Audacy brand managers about the growth of talent. Audacy is making a greater commitment to growing their people. In the Q&A, their wonderful personality, Katie Neal, asked how to make a show more creative.
Well, you have to put in your 10,000 hours. But an X Factor to making those hours valuable, and my answer to her question, is to surround everyone with more curiosity. Creativity and curiosity are tied together, as I’ve discussed in this blog before (Steve Uses the “C” Word).
Prep isn’t sitting around a room, throwing out a big topic and then asking, “What can we do with it?” Prep is marrying your elusive wonderment against a topic and engaging others to truly come up with angles that are memorable, different, and can’t miss.
In the last two weeks there are two examples with shows I work with that inspire me:
These two treatments of those two big topics happened because I have curious people on the shows who are forever falling down the rabbit hole, reading about it all to further stimulate their fascination.
Curiosity needs to be nurtured. Are we doing enough for our talent to do that?
I am so lucky to have been around shows over the years who always practice their curiosity. In almost every instance, that curiosity has become permanent and part of the ethos on how those shows prep.
Look at your program. Do you have curious people? And are they surrounded by even more curiosity?
You want a show that’s memorable, different, and can’t miss? Go find people like that, who channel their inner 8-year-old, and question everything, with an insatiable appetite to learn more, more, and more about everything.
Then watch what happens to the creativity of the cast and your show.
That ain’t a bad way to spend those 10,000 hours to becoming epic.
Wonderment and unique angles to big topics engage the audience. What Will Smith did to Chris Rock was easily the biggest story last week. Every show should have been on it a lot and from multiple angles to keep the audience interested. In a brainstorm in our weekly call, while talking about the topic, we wondered, as did everyone, if the slap was choreographed and the entire episode staged. That was part of the national conversation so we felt a need to address this, too. The simple thing would be to ask listeners’ opinions. Not a bad move. What Lexi and Banks, KUBL, Salt Lake City did, though, was engage a body language expert found on Google who analyzed the video. The gentleman they found came to this conclusion based solely on body language: it was faked. This is not only an engaging treatment of a big topic, it could get external press, too.
Tell listeners a story about something a celebrity did that is in the news. But leave the name of the celebrity out to engage them. Then give three celebrity names and open the phones. If the caller guesses the correct celebrity for the story, they win. Thanks to The Ed Lover Show with Jen BT, 104.3 JAMS, Chicago for this idea.