Matt McAllister, Gabe, and Captain Ron, The Wolf, Seattle with The Sister Massage

Tension creates great breaks.  Conflict and drama inside a story or opposing forces of an antagonist and protagonist working against each other is the reason you choose to tell a story on the show.  If you went to the mall to buy new underwear, it’s a story not worth telling.  But if, while there, you saw someone get arrested, then you tell it.  Weirdness and moral dilemmas work, too.  Take what happened on the Matt McAllister Show with Gabe and Captain Ron, The Wolf, Seattle.  Ron’s sister got her massage license.  He’s considering letting his sister give him a massage.  You feeling the weirdness?  They did, too, as it’s an odd thesis.  Time to ask the audience what they think.  This is memorable because it’s true and they ask the audience to decide.  Find that tension in your stories and then lean on that to make it memorable.

The Enablers

Lots of people are feeling lots of stress because of politics.  How to deal with all that stress?  Eat your feelings!  With Halloween coming up, talk to people feeling some stress from life, then become The Enablers.  Give them total permission to have as much Halloween candy as they’d like to get through the stress!

How Long Until It Goes South?

Here’s a fun one.  Tell the audience you’re posting something innocuous about the election on Facebook (“I’m looking forward to voting in a  couple of weeks.  Still undecided.”).  Then guess at how many replies until things go south and someone says something about one of the candidates.

Kira and Logan, WOKQ, Portsmouth, NH with Liam Payne Passes

There’s this exercise I do when brainstorming with shows around a pop culture or local topic that helps them develop treatments which puts their authenticity front and center.  It’s called Know Wonder.  What do you know about the topic and also, what do you wonder?  Researching every topic stimulates one’s creativity.  That curiosity fuels interesting breaks because, if you’re fascinated by it in the presentation, your audience will be, too.  Liam Payne from One Direction dies unexpectedly.  Many shows would report what they know to the audience.  Add in some curiosity and it comes alive.  Kira and Logan, WOKQ, Portsmouth, NH wondered why people cry when a celebrity they’ve never met dies.  It led to fascinating calls from their fans.  Here’s what they did the day after Liam died.  This is compelling, relevant, topical radio.

The Power of the Purple People

A couple of weeks ago, former Coach Tim Walz asked me to sit next to him at a high school football game in my hometown of Raleigh – he bought me popcorn.  JD Vance stopped over last week to see if I owned any cats.  Kamala’s coming by on Thursday for coffee (I hear she likes a splash of hazelnut).  Trump wants me to stop by the Applebee’s on Hillsborough Street next week to look at some discounted watches.

I live in one of the seven purple states that will decide who the next president will be.  They are here All.  The.  Time.  Asking for my vote.  It’s powerful to be a purple person!

Retail politics (showing up and asking for the vote) is something we’ve gotten away from in radio.  It’s now a powerful differentiator for shows and stations that truly are live and local.  Having actual eye contact, shaking the hands of fans and asking those who aren’t to try out your show.

If you’re a talent who desperately wants to win even more, create space with your competitor with a year-long commitment to meeting fans and would-be listeners in your market.

Here’s what I’d love you to consider:  develop a 2025 campaign to do just that.  Maybe call it One Hundred Thousand High Fives or Fifty Thousand Fist Bumps.  Or come up with your own name.  Then bring it to sales to find a title sponsor so they can make some money (you’ll be more valuable to the cluster if you do).  Then commit to do it twice a month.

Do you need to actually fist bump 50,000 people?  Nope.  But craft in-person appearances to meet as many people as you can.  Your competitor won’t and it will be a difference-maker for you.

Hint:  don’t ask them to come to you.  The “I’ll be at Jiffy Lube this Saturday from 9-11” won’t work.  Ain’t no one going out of their way just to meet you.  Instead, where are people you can go to?  Set up outside an arena before a big game or concert.  Find the busiest intersection with foot traffic and go there at lunch for a half hour.

I know we ask a lot of you as talent.  And I also know what you’re thinking.  You won’t be paid for this. But meeting as many people as you can (wherever they are) and asking them to give you a shot works.  That makes you more powerful as a talent because of the higher ratings and revenue opportunity you created.  Those will be your wins.

I’m not sure who’ll get North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes.  But whoever does, it’ll be because they were here a lot paying attention to us purple people.

You do that, too, and watch what happens.

Moug and Karla, B96, Chicago with Truth or Treat

A treatment of a topic rarely taken advantage of is street audio.  Getting outside voices on your show brings some color into the break. Much like when Jay Leno did Jaywalking or David Letterman interacted with people on the streets of New York.  Kudos to Moug and Karla, B96, Chicago for Truth or Treat.  Knowing you have to go to the crowds, they showed up to talk with Chicago Bears tailgaters.  Those folks are slightly loose and all in good moods.  So using them will bring that vibe to the show.  In this feature, they wrote tons of personal questions.  The tailgater had to choose one and answer it.  Note how they had the tailgater read the question.  That brought a fun dimension to the feature as we could hear their voice emotionally react to the personal thing they had to answer.

The World Series of Worst Halloween Candy

Normally when you do a March Madness-type grid, you’re looking for the best of something.  Not this time!  Put together a list of everyone’s least favorite Halloween treats and crown The World Series of Worst Halloween Candy.  It’s a double-topical idea!  Thanks to Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh for the idea.  Let the voting begin!

Steve Richards, MIX 96.5, Asheville, NC with Listener Jen and Hurricane Helene

What radio does better than any other medium is connection.  Making people feel like they aren’t alone.  The pictures and videos coming out of western North Carolina are horrific.  Loss of life.  Entire towns wiped away by Hurricane Helene.  While it shouldn’t take a natural disaster to connect listeners, we shouldn’t underestimate our power to do that, too.  It’s why many fans choose us each day.  Amongst the devastation, we make listeners feel like they’re not going through it by themselves.  My friend Steve Richards, MIX 96.5, Asheville, NC is one of the very best I know at this.  As that station powered back up, here’s a call from a listener on her experience.  It’s riveting story-telling with multiple connection points.  We need to know what’s below the service emotionally with our listeners, whether it’s a bad situation or not.  Connect there and we’ll always be important to them

Grandma Does the Haunted Houses

Bet you have a bunch of haunted houses in the market for Halloween.  Not the homes people think have ghosts.  The ones put together by local businesses who aim to scare people as they walk through.  What might be fun is to bring the show’s grandmothers through some of them, recording the entire thing.  Those would be social media videos that’d get tons of views.

A.I. Doesn’t Know U

Let’s chat about how A.I. and the one thing it really can’t do to help you be successful.

The three best areas for content for any show, regardless of format, are pop culture (pop = popular = familiar), local, and character development (you!).

A.I. is marvelous at getting you the latest on topical news items and can even shrink them down to bite size.  A.I. can even write your teases, name things, and be somewhat creative.  A.I. will have no problem, with the right prompt, to curate local topics and references.

But what A.I. cannot do is reflect your life or teach you how to tell your stories to the audience, so you connect with them.  And that connection is the key that unlocks every door to your forming a relationship with listeners.

What is character development?  It comes from two areas:  be honest discussing a topic.  That means no concocted points-of-view to create phony conflict.  If I tell you golf is stupid or that Diddy deserves to be in prison with no parole and mean it, I’ll convey to you something about me that will teach you who I am.  If the tone with which I deliver that message is fun or serious, then you’ll get my vibe.

But the best character content comes when you share stories about your life the typical listener can identify with.  If they say “yea, me, too” then it’s a win.  And only you can generate those by having a life and engaging in experiences large and small in your market to find them.

Stories are essential to connect with others.  That’s why country music is so beloved.  Every song is a story, and any songwriter will tell you their imperative is to tell their truth.

In efforts to move your show from being feature-driven to being personality-driven, having those stories fans identify with and see themselves in, will reinforce a bond between you and them that is almost unbreakable.  A.I. cannot get you there.

I ask shows when we start our work what they want listeners to say about their show unaided after we do this for a year.  They all say they want the audience to say they feel like they know them.  That’s a big win.

And no matter how much you use A.I. (free or otherwise), it will never be able to tell your stories in your way.  Because, as the title of this blog says, A.I. Doesn’t Know U.  You have soul, A.I. doesn’t.

Work hard to have a life.  Figure out which experiences will give you stories that will allow pure connection points with the most listeners.  Continue learning how to tell stories better, then do all that.  Because nowhere else in the market can listeners hear your stories, but on your show.

Go use A.I. to make certain tasks doing your show easier.  But understand its limitations today.

When the audience cares about you, they’ll care about your show.  And when you’ve accomplished that, you become something your radio station truly needs and can’t find elsewhere.

Use A.I. for what it does well.  But know that if you can’t truly reveal who you are to the audience, they will never get close to you.  If who you are isn’t part of your content package, A.I. won’t be able to compensate.  Because A.I. doesn’t know U.

While both are important, radio’s substantive wins will now come more from art than science.  Go be an original.