Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston How Much Do You Make?

You might be shocked what listeners will share.  We found out when we added the new feature How Much Do You Make on Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston.  This one’s easy.  Ask a listener to call and tell you what they do for a living.  You then get to ask a bunch of questions about their job and their life.  Doing so pulls listeners in so they can try to figure out that person’s yearly salary based on the answers.  After a few questions, each person on the show guesses the caller’s income, then they reveal it.  We came up with this idea when we saw Parade Magazine’s yearly What People Earn edition.  We were stunned how many people were willing to share this with us.  You might be, too.

The Smartest in the Room

With schools back in session, let’s find a high school teacher who’ll come on once a week to give every member of the show a five question quiz they gave their students that week.  They ask you the questions on day one, you submit your answers, and they come back the next day at the same time to see who passed.  Do this for the first month of school to see who the smartest is in the room.

12 Important Fall Reminders

With school back in session and the fall upon us, listeners are back to their post-summer routines. Inspired by the smart brand managers and talent I’ve been around, here are some reminders that will help your show:

  1. Let’s remember and assume the audience knows less about our show than we do. So…frequent resets of who’s on the program (introducing the cast regularly) will help both current and new listeners.
  2. Reset our regular features. “If you’re new to our show,” is a very powerful sentence because it’s a reset statement which allows you to explain, in one sentence, what the feature we’re about to do is all about. Giving them context will make it easier for them to listen.
  3. Teasing is critical to get more listening. Teases, if well-written, add forward momentum to a show and compel images that if listeners do have to leave, they’ll miss something great (so they might return the next day).
  4. Horizontal teasing is your most valuable tease – telling your 7:45 audience this morning the substantive thing you’re doing tomorrow morning at 7:45 is powerful. We stand a greater chance of gaining another occasion if we do this. Daily cume is critical to the ratings going up.
  5. Listeners know if you’re prepared. Know your topic, how you’ll get into it (hook them), support the topic, and then get out before you walk into the studio every day. Let’s show our fans that respect and leave them wanting more.
  6. Average attention spans are ten seconds. The first ten seconds are the most important of every break. Spend your most time on that and the audience will stay.
  7. Listeners’ default position is that they’re being sold something. Listeners come for great content. Give them that, then sell them something. Remember when talking about a station promotion (which is important to do), you’re selling them something as that isn’t perceived as content.
  8. Brevity is critical. It’s one of the keys to keeping listeners. Let’s not waste their time with breaks that don’t have a focus and game plan. A great writer values editing the most of all that they do. Ditto social media posts – those that do well tend to be short and take up no more space than they have to.
  9. I know we get tired of hearing the same old songs on the show, but the listeners don’t. Familiarity in everything is key to winning in morning drive. Support and be enthusiastic about everything your station does. You are a voice of trust and credibility to the audience and will be a bigger part of the station because of it. There’s no downside to that.
  10. We are an immensely mobile society so much of their listening is in cars. Think of this and imagine it as you’re designing your breaks. Our very, very, very best content should go in that block. We can create the greatest impressions when we have them as a captive audience in the car and give them our most entertaining content.
  11. Be brilliant at the basics. Weather, traffic, identifying the radio station by name, setting up breaks, having payoffs. Being great at the basics always helps to get that extra measure of ratings.
  12. Finally, the one thing listeners want more of than anything? Connection, fun, and laughter. With exception, they want an escape from the anxiety of life. Provide that human connection then be fun/funny/laughter/humor/silliness (pick your word) and give it to them and they’ll come back the next day for more. A connection, your honesty, and authenticity go a long way to character building and showing your humanity.

Fall is a great time to reset the show – freshen up your positioning and try new ideas as you recapture audience that changed over the summer due to lifestyle and new listeners find you.

For a printable copy of these reminders, click here.

The Meat in My Mouth

Football is about to start again and with that, there will be lots of tailgating.  Go grab audio of tailgators at a local game.  Talk to them while they’re eating.  Play that audio for the listener, who has to guess The Meat in My Mouth.  Make sure the person eating also reveals the meat in their mouth!

Karen, Johnny, and Intern Anthony, WNEW-FM, New York It’s Our Boss’s Birthday

Let’s have some fun with the boss, shall we?  Karen, Johnny, and Intern Anthony, WNEW-FM, New York decided to prank their boss, Jim Ryan, on his birthday.  Normally you might think this is inside talk.  What listener knows Jim Ryan, the Brand Manager of the Audacy station?  But that’s irrelevant, because the team quickly changes this to a relationships bit and displays the silliness of their sense of humor with the Carvel cake prank they played on him.  Destinations, game plans, and prep help you get to what listeners want most, which are payoffs.  They’ll not spend much time allowing any show to talk around a topic if they don’t know where they are going.  So it’s irrelevant who the program director is.  What matters most is the audience relates to the topic (today is our boss’s birthday) and laughs at the funny prank they pull on him.

Josie, Carlin, and Brent, Indie 88, Toronto, Cancelled, Delayed, or On Time?

We suggested a new game a few weeks ago on the Monday Morning Free Ideas page called Cancelled, Delayed, or On Time. Designed to play off the summer travel trouble vacationers endured, the show chooses a flight leaving the airport that morning, a listener guesses if it’s delayed, cancelled, or on-time, then you call the airline’s voice-activated phone line to see its status.  Our wins will always come when we’re relevant (travel trouble was a topic over the summer everyone could relate to whether they traveled by air or not) and then figuring out what to do with them that no one else will think of.  When listeners come to your show and you’re on the biggest topics and doing something with them conjured from your creative brain, that isn’t perceived as a wacky radio idea, you win big because you have a show that can’t be found anywhere but your station.  Here’s Josie, Carlin, and Brent, Indie 88, Toronto, with a couple versions of the game.

How Old, How Many?

Ta-dah.  A new feature for the show designed to get phones and easy social media action.  How Old, How Many!  Choose a category like tattoos.  The audience then tells you how old they are and how many tattoos they have.  You can easily do this with a bunch of categories (jobs, cities you’ve lived in, sex partners), all resulting in a frame that leads you to explore some stories around it.

First Laugher Loses

Does your show have a relationship with a local TV station?  See if the anchors/reporters will do a video series with you called First Laugher Loses.  Someone on your show sits facing someone on their air.  You go back and forth telling short jokes, trying not to laugh.  The first person to laugh at the other’s joke loses.  It’ll help soften the images of the TV folks, give you great videos for social media, and some free attention from the TV station.

Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh The Mega Millions Pre-Resignation

Mega Millions is the Hot List topic.  It’s worth over one billion dollars and you aren’t relevant unless you devote some content breaks to it so your audience aligns your show with an image of being relevant.  The big question is what will you do with that topic that you can own?  How do you treat it in a way where your audience laughs, possibly talks about the break, and also gives you an image of being imaginative without crossing the line of being a wacky radio show?  Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh decided to have the entire staff get in on the content.  Over the course of 45-minutes, they had the staff call their boss to “pre-resign” believing they would win the billion that night.  They then flipped it and had the audience do the same.  Pretty creative idea against a highly relevant topic.