Archive for category: Audio

Last week’s audio featured pure silliness – Moug and Karla, B96, Chicago getting a witch to put a hex on a rival sports team.  Let’s keep both themes in this week’s audio.  The premier sports match up in the Raleigh-Durham area is whenever Duke plays UNC in basketball.  As someone who lives here, this area comes to a standstill the day of this game.  We talk a lot about topic-treatment-tone, the Coleman Insights inspired 3T’s of content.  Here’s one you can steal if you have a similar sports rivalry in your town – and it’s memorable because of it’s silliness.  Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh wondered the day of the game who’d win.  So they decided to go into the future.  And where is it tomorrow?  Australia!  Where the game has already happened!  They called Australia to find out who won, before the game happened.

Work with me and know I’ll ask in every break, “what’s the pivot?”  Shows that are not much more than chatter are fatiguing, because listeners have short attention spans and require glitter being thrown at them very quickly in any break to keep their interest.  Examples of pivots:  talking about Travis Kelce marrying Taylor Swift?  Here comes his high school football coach to add a fresh perspective.  In a conversation about Robert Redford passing?  Here’s a fun quiz on his movies.  The Morning Wolfpack (Matt, Gabe, and Captain Ron) at 100.7, The Wolf, Seattle have dubbed this the QAP (the Quick Ass Pivot).  In a conversation about the Hot Topic of the Mariners run to the World Series, here comes a doctored voice from ChatGPT, who they asked to predict the winner.  In many of your content breaks, plan the pivot – the treatment to the topic you’ve chosen – to make the break all yours and be memorable because of what you did with it.

News features, when done on morning shows, are a smart thing.  The items tend to about whatever is going on right now (very important).  But the goal should not be conveying news items and facts.  Because there are credible news sources all around you, the win of these features now come in the conversation that happens about the story and the commentary offered by those in the chat.  You will define yourself and create a connection point when you’re honest about whatever is being talked about.  Yes, there are exceptions to this observation (how a talent feels about what happened to Charlie Kirk is a total danger zone so avoid that, as an example).  But for most items, when in conversation, the most authentic reactions always appear, shifting your trending feature from fact-based to observation/opinion-based thus engaging the audience more deeply.  Here’s a dated, but very good example of how this should be done from Karen Carson in the Morning on WNEW-FM, New York City.

You live in one of America’s biggest sports city and target women.  Despite that, you’d never talk to the NFL coach in town because women don’t care about sports, right?  Well…not if you’re Sue and Kendra, Magic 106.7, Boston.  They wanted to talk to the new head coach for the Patriots so they asked if Coach Vrabel would come on.  Once the yes rolled in, the work began.  Because this audience doesn’t want to hear X’s and O’s or worse, sports cliches to the standard questions, they set about something different.  They wanted to learn about the coach as a human being – their entire chat was to show his genuine side.  Some shows would think just getting the coach is enough.  These guys set about asking what they wanted to learn about him personally, believing the audience would want the same.  What they got is a one-of-a-kind interview that connected with the audience.

This is one of the more interesting breaks I’ve heard in the past few weeks.  It comes from Wood and Nicole, Taste of Country Mornings for Townsquare.  Wood lets us peek into his friendships and tells the audience he has a pal named Brian who is very ugly.  He says his buddies tell Brian this all the time.  What a hook, huh?  Brian is dating a somewhat younger, very good looking gal and the group of friends think she’s a gold digger!  So they get Brian the Ugly Guy on the phone, where Wood and Nicole quiz him about his new girlfriend.  I love many things about this break you should hear:  it has the hook noted above, it’s edgy from the start (the first 30 seconds really capture you), the questions are highly personal and make me lean in, and it never lives in the mushy middle.  This call is good character development for Wood, based on Brian’s real life, and memorable.