Archive for category: Audio

We recently added a new character to Josie, Carlin, and Brent, Indie 88, Toronto.  Brent’s character is the young, single guy who lives in a 700-square foot apartment in the heart of downtown.  He has a ton of friends and spends his weekends having a good time.  This is a nice contrast to the others on the show who are in longer-term relationships and more settled.  We are focusing a lot of time defining Brent’s character and creating that contrast in the room.  Brent recently got an interview with Fred VanFleet, who plays for the NBA’s Toronto Raptors.  Besides doing the usual Q&A, Brent also asked Fred to review his online dating profile to make commentary.  This is a unique way to both showcase the player’s personality and define Brent.

A great resource for your show, as you well know, is your listeners.  They have stories and experiences you don’t and can help grow the entertainment quotient of your program every time you focus on them.  Back when Covid and being quarantined was a thing, John and Tammy, KSON, San Diego did the very simple break asking listeners what they taught themselves while holed up at home with nothing else to do.  Not enough shows take advantage of grooming their audience to being full participants in their shows.  From listeners, you get great storytelling based on real life stuff.  Once you tell the audience your story, pivot and always ask the listeners for theirs.  They are your best resource to creating a show about the audience, which bounces back to you tenfold as once you make them a star, they’ll return the favor.

When a major controversy comes up in the studio like who does the laundry at home better, it’s best to bring in an expert.  Look for people at the station who can have occasional roles complimenting and elevating the content on your show because they can be a foil.  Mother Mary is one of them for Zach and Brittney, WBYT, South Bend, IN.  The show got into a deep conversation about doing laundry recently.  So they each did their laundry, brought it in, and had a co-worker, who they named Mother Mary (because she sounds very motherly), critique who did it better.  We’re at our best when we’re being silly and relatable.  This one accomplished both because it was so frivolous.  What Mother Mary added made it even more fun.

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.

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.