Matt, Gabe, and Captain Ron, KKWF (The Wolf), Seattle with Operation K-9 Companion

You might be doing a community service project now to show your heart.  That’s a smart move to rally the audience to help you reach some goal to make the community a better place.  Listeners are searching for any reason to feel better about their town, those less fortunate, and themselves.  Your event probably does all of that.  Matt, Gabe, and Captain Ron, KKWF (The Wolf), Seattle just wrapped up their annual effort called Operation K-9 Companion where they ask the audience to help them buy and train service animals for soldiers who are home with PTSD.  Lots of country stations do this – it’s a great event.  This year, the team rallied their listeners to help them raise over $400,000 in one week.  That number is outstanding.  I reminded them that this week-long effort is not a fundraising event.  It’s a story-telling event.  Tell stories and you’ll motivate more people who are inclined to give to do so.  You’ll also elevate the images of your show with those who won’t.  Below are two stories told that showcase two very different emotions.  In the first, they surprise the woman who runs the organization with her mom, who beams with pride.  In the other, a soldier tells a tough story about how his service dog passed away.  Both stories have intense emotions, elevating things for the team.

The Best Holiday Gifts Cost Nothing

Inflation is up, people can’t even afford groceries.  So, add this idea every day until the holidays to help people out.  Ask listeners what gifts they can give this year that cost absolutely nothing.  Sometimes those are the best gifts so, have one listener each day suggest a gift for a loved one that doesn’t cost money.

The Raymond Rule – Why Your Characters Need Conflict – Sitcom Secrets for Radio Success

Some nights while eating dinner, I have no appetite on TV for the political shout-fests or sports round table know-it-alls.  So, I keep clicking until I hit gold:  a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond.  A show that hasn’t been on the air in 20 years but always delivers the laughs.

I wanna break down why and then offer your first challenge once the show returns from the holiday break in January.

The foundation of any successful show is its plot and characters.  Without either, you have no direction and can’t have a content strategy.  What is the unique plot of your show?  What is your show about?

Everybody Loves Raymond’s Plot:  Ray Barone, a successful sportswriter and family man, deals with a resentful brother, an always disappointed wife, and meddling parents who happen to live across the street.

It may shock you to know that they made 210 episodes over nine seasons.  And that’s the plot of every one of them (on purpose).  Ditto any successful show (Seinfeld, Survivor, Friends, Big Bang Theory, etc.).  What’s your plot?  The unique one-sentence frame of what your show is about?

Then come the characters.  They must be relatable and each different to lend a contrast to the others.  Here’s how you connect with the audience.  Well-defined characters allow listeners to identify with one.  It’s the tension with the others that makes the plot come to life.

If you’ve watched even a few Everybody Loves Raymonds, you will recognize and identify with these characters:

Ray:  the show’s protagonist who lives across the street from his parents and struggles with the demands of work and his family, often getting a lot wrong.

Debra:  Ray’s wife who is strong-willed, exasperated by Ray’s immaturity and his family’s constant intrusions into their lives. She can never live up to the expectations of Ray’s mother.

Robert:  Ray’s older and taller brother who’s an insecure cop and is always overshadowed by Ray.

Marie:  Ray and Robert’s mother who is an overbearing, meddling woman who constantly puts Ray on a pedestal, while criticizing Debra.

Frank:  Marie’s husband who is loud, sarcastic, and eccentric, and has a habit of yelling and making bizarre comments.

Who are the characters on your show?  They must, must, must be grounded in the truth.  The difference between your characters and those on Everybody Loves Raymond is that yours are real (the TV characters are assigned to great comedic actors).  You cannot give a persona to someone on your show – they’ll be inauthentic and the audience will sense it.  Apply this exercise above to your cast then ask where the tension is and how they are different.

I was recently asked by a program director to evaluate their show.  They said there doesn’t seem to be any electricity in the on-air conversation.  It was apparent why when I listened.  He has two of the same people.  The only difference was their gender.  They are both spouses, parents, the same age, and basically held the same world view.  Not much contrast there.

CBS just had an Everybody Loves Raymond 30th Anniversary Special.  The show’s creator, Phil Rosenthal, said the program is really about his home life.  Because real life is relatable, very funny (if you have the right scripts and characters), universal, and timeless.

When you come back in January, run this exercise as a re-set for the year.  There is never a downside to affirming your plot and characters.

Once you do, your content becomes easier to find and execute.  Your connection with the audience heightens because of it.  And you’ll own that turf.  If you’re strategic about all of this, there’s no way you don’t see greater success a year from now.

Iris and Grizz, KSII, El Paso, TX with Content that Becomes the Tease

We tease content for two reasons:  to extend listening with a provocative, intriguing tease.  The other is to make listeners who must leave the show wonder so they’ll return the next day out of a fear of missing something.  Often we think of an effective tease as one or two sentences.  What happens when content becomes your tease?  Iris and Grizz, KSII, El Paso, TX recently combined the two efforts very effectively.  They have a daily benchmark where Iris gives pickup lines centered around the biggest topics of the day.  Pennies will no longer be minted so Iris writes lines around the topic, then opens the phones (ChatGPT can help with this).  Listen to them here do content and how their chemistry drives the break, which leads to the tease of the actual lines.  I’m laughing at this break, so I’ll stay for the next.

The NP Pledge

Appropriate for anytime the family gets together:  The NP Pledge.  That’s the No Politics Pledge.  Have listeners call to take a pledge that they won’t be the one to bring up politics while with their family this week.  And that if it does come up, they’ll steer it in another direction!

David, Sue, and Kendra, Magic 107.7, Boston with Sal and His Apple Trees

There is content all around you.  As you engage people at the station or in life, listen out for stories to tell and quirky characters to put on.  In Boston, Sal the Boss is a character on every show in the Audacy cluster.  Sal always brings great stories, a swagger and attitude, and a terrific sense of humor.  One of Sal’s passions is his apple trees.  Each fall, he picks his apples and gives them away to those at the stations.  So this year, David, Sue, and Kendra, Magic 107.7, Boston had him come in to talk about it.  They then blindfolded Sal, made him take bites of apples, and he had to identify the type of apple it was.  This was fun audio, but an ever better video for social media.  The audio is below and the video is here.

The Thanksgiving Motel

Next week’s Thanksgiving holiday brings food and family.  And for many listeners, family they don’t want to see.  Go grab a few nights at the cheapest motel in town, take calls from listeners asking which family members will argue or get on their nerves first, and give them the nights in the motel to send those folks to when they get aggravated.  (This might be pure theater but a fun idea to listen to.)

Zog and Ivy Unleashed, Power 96, Miami with Is Zog a Thief?

Evolving story lines keep listeners hooked to stay to a conclusion.  Much like a TV show, we keep coming back because we want the ending.  This was the case with Zog and Ivy Unleashed, Power 96, Miami.  Zog shared on a Zoom that he’d gone to the mall to buy some T-shirts.  They only had a few in his size so he took those and the store shipped the rest.  When the package arrived at his home, he got all the ordered T-shirts as well as doubles for the ones he already had.  To many shows, this would be a one-off break.  But, we played with it.  When I asked the room what Zog should do, and if he were to keep them all if he were stealing, we were off to the races on a story line to hook the audience.  Break #1 is the dilemma and moral question, break #2 are calls with listeners chiming in, and, because he’s a good guy and doesn’t want the worker to get in trouble (keeping in character), break #3 is Zog calling the mall store to ask what he should do.  So instead of one break, we get three to extend listening with a story that has an unexpected conclusion.

We Light the Christmas Trees

In a few week’s time, Christmas trees will be lit in towns all over your metro.  Get that schedule and invite the mayor on your show from each of those towns to promote it (uber local content).  Then, convince the mayor to let you come and hit the switch that evening – trying to amass as many tree lightnings as you can.

My Weather App Curses at Me – Why I Love That and What It Means for You

When Dick Cheney died, I wondered what the weather was for the rest of the day.  Those are two completely unrelated items.  Until I share that I opened my Carrot Weather app, and it said:

Storm clouds have formed over Raleigh because Dick Cheney has died.  There’s a great chance for thunderstorms because he’s trying to argue his way into heaven.

There are dozens of weather apps to choose from.  The Weather Channel, Weather Underground, AccuWeather, WeatherBug, NOAA Weather, Wunderground, and on and on.  Every single one of them alike.  They’re utilities to us – we just want weather information – so it doesn’t matter which we’re loyal to.

But not my Carrot Weather.  It has attitude and edge, and it almost always makes me laugh because it’s topical.  And it curses at me.  Where I’m blah on all the above, this app entertains me while I’m getting the weather information.  As a result, I don’t shrug my shoulders at Carrot.  Even its name is different from all the above.  What do carrots have to do with the weather?  Nothing!  I’m loyal to it because of these differences, and gladly pay their $30 yearly fee because I (we?) need more laughter in our lives.

The world has gotten edgier.  Most comedians, with some exceptions, have an attitude that lives on the fringes.  Our politicians curse.  The memes we see online that make us feel something have a harsher edge.  And now my weather app is there.

Every choice in any brand category starts from the perceptual position of “they’re all the same”.  In radio, we live in a “sea of sameness”.  This was a point I made on a recent podcast done for RJ Curtis at CRS.  Pamal Broadcasting’s Kevin Callahan, and the terrific consultants Fred Jacobs and Randy Lane, and I talked about talent and the responsibility we have to differentiate ourselves in this morass of “we’re all alike” to listeners.

I’m certainly not suggesting you get on the air and curse like my weather app.  But I am asking what imaginative things did you do on your show today?  If you answer, “we launched a phone topic in the 8:00 hour and got great calls” or “we themed the trivia in our daily benchmark,” I’d probably buzz you out of the game.  Because to the audience, that reinforces we’re all the same.

Carrot Weather is imaginative.  When I got the app, it wanted to know my political leanings and how comfortable I was with profanity (that got dialed up to 11).  Now, when I want to know the temps today, I get attitude and profanity before it tells me, making me laugh or emote in some way so I remember it and become more loyal because it does something its competitors don’t.

One of the points we made on the podcast was that radio doesn’t have a listening problem, it has a top-of-mind-awareness problem.  Our curiosity and imagination must be re-captured if we’re ever going to fix that. And it’s okay to have an edge (important:  if you don’t have a personality that is edgy then don’t be that – be who you are – but that’s not to say you can’t find someone who has it and bring that into your show).

Innovation takes us there, which is why Carrot Weather, when I now open the app, tells me it’s become a musical.  It’s something quirky and new.  It’s opening number is called “What the Eff Is This?”  I bet 1:50 in you’ll be giggling and then curious if it’ll rain today.

I’m not Steve to the app.  I’m Meatbag.  Carrot the Musical continues – here’s I Hate You, Fun to Make Fun Of, and Human.  My weather app keeps entertaining me.  I just have to open the app every day to unlock the songs (more usage/more occasions).  Doing all of this helps them separate from all the other weather apps.  Instructional for us in radio, too.  How do you separate from all the other stations?

We just concluded our yearly state fair in Raleigh.  To make an appropriate analogy, radio is too much bumper cars, and not enough KMG Tango, a ride that spins and flips you in three separate directions all at the same time.

This is the one thing I preach to every show.  Innovate, ideate, be weird and quirky.  Come at things noticeably different, and push back on the standard things every show everywhere does with the topics.  Go be a little odd and edgy.  Because doing same old, same old won’t work any longer.

Rise above it by surrounding yourself with people of like mind so it influences your show.  Be big and bold, have some swagger, and know how you will be noticeably (and at times dramatically) different from everything else out there.  That is our best way of reigniting listeners’ passion for what we do.

Now, as Carrot Weather wants me to remind you, there’s no chance of rain today so go be fucking epic.