George, Mo, and Erik, KILT-FM, Houston The Louisville Shootings

One of your primary jobs is to make the audience care about you.  That’s why great character development is rooted in honesty and vulnerability.  You care about people you know and that’s why you reveal who you are to the audience.  To bring them closer.  There seems to be a mass shooting every week in America.  You may opt in on talking about one, but not another.  The bank shootings in Louisville last week were especially personal for George, Mo, and Erik, KILT-FM Houston.  Instead of this becoming about gun control or mental health, listen to how it’s personalized by George, who couldn’t get a hold of his son when the story broke.  His kid worked one block away and was on lock down.  It’s one thing to talk about a topic as serious as this.  It’s another to personalize it so humanly as is done here.  You leave knowing George better and caring about him.  Do that with your topics.

Lou and Shannon, WJLK, The Jersey Shore The Celebrity Name Game

Shows need benchmarks – these are appointments you set with listeners that they time their morning by.  These features help insert you into the routine of your fans, which helps bring images to the show and higher ratings.  Looking for a new benchmark, Lou and Shannon, WJLK, The Jersey Shore know that the best benchmarks are easy to follow along, fun, and have a vicarious quality to them – in other words, listeners are playing along in the car as they tune in.  Add the need for it to be sustainable – meaning you must have enough content available so it could be on your show for years.  Here’s the Celebrity Name Game (terrific name for a feature because it rhymes).  It’s simple – they describe a celebrity and the caller has to name them – yet very effective because of the content and how it’s done.

Gregg, Freddie, and Danielle, MIX 104.1, Boston International Women’s Day

Lots of shows covered International Women’s Day a few weeks ago.  Whether you target women or not, this was appropriate as the topic was high profile, placing it as a rare exception to my belief that doing national this-and-that days is irrelevant.  Our job in radio is to connect with the audience from whatever position we have on any known topic.  Where most shows probably asked the audience to name a woman in life important to them or to acknowledge some prominent women in the community, Gregg, Freddie, and Danielle, MIX 104.1, Boston did things one better.  They introduced to the audience the women in each of their lives important to them.  Making this topic personal and hearing their pride as they talked with who they chose defined them, leaving the audience with a sense of each as human beings.  That’s taking a relevant topic and creating great character development.  It’s no harder than that!

George, Mo, and Erik, KILT-FM, Houston Being Around Interesting People

Each of us, when choosing those we want to spend time with, always make room for the fun, interesting people.  No one wants to be around anyone boring.  That thesis holds true for your show and the relationship you have with the audience.  What accentuates that is when someone on your show embraces out-of-the-ordinary experiences.  You admire those people and even become aspirational to them.  This week’s epic audio features George, Mo, and Erik, KILT-FM, Houston.  Mo got a letter from an inmate.  We decided to read it on-air and make it content.  This audio features a fascinating call from a listener who’s an ex-inmate on what it would mean to the writer if she wrote back.  Interesting and touching.  Mo embraces this kind of content so we’ve decided to get letters from inmates at the sixteen Houston area prisons to keep the narrative alive.  Be interesting and the audience will want to be around you each day.

Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh The Break You Won’t Understand

Relatabilty is an important image you must own to connect with the audience.  Communicating “we understand what’s important in your life” goes a long way to the audience wanting to be around you.  But you must also go deeper to connect with fans in emotional ways that makes that bond harder to break.  In a market like Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill that houses major universities, March Madness is a critically important topic as many are into it and everyone’s aware of it.  Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh know the images of each university.  As someone who also lives in the market and is a die hard NC State fan, I’ll share that they always figure out how to disappoint us.  The show knows the average Wolfpack fan is cynical about their team.  Listen to this call you probably won’t understand.  It’s an NC State fan who puts on full display that cynicism.  NC State fans listening to their show, and everyone else who’s lived in the market for longer than a minute, are connecting and laughing at this.  Bonus points (important):  hear to how local this break is!

Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston Side Hustles

The best phone topics come not from a prep service, but from your life.  Prep service topics tend to be very generic and evergreen.  “Do you like Peeps?”  Nope, anyone can do that anywhere.  Your best topics, the things you want the audience to contribute to, come from stories you will tell about items going on in your life right now, with a pivot to then have the audience tell you their stories just like it.  Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston, are masters at doing this.  Dan on the show and Karson’s wife, Lana, have found side hustles.  Break one below is them telling their story.  Lana’s is collecting cans and Dan’s is one not very traditional when it comes to the topic.  Both are well-told stories by funny people. They engage the audience emotionally, then ask the audience to call in with theirs.  If there’s a recipe on how to do a phone topic, this is is it and it’s well done.

Lou and Shannon, WJLK, The Jersey Shore, Shannon’s Ex Dishes on Valentine’s Day

We get to holidays and everyone seems to do the same stuff every year.  Innovation is one of the four critical images a show must earn.  Not in a “here’s a new bit we’re doing” kind of way.  We just need to identify the right topics and do something different around it that fits the show.  It’s the treatment of the best topics that make you different.  Lou and Shannon, WJLK, The Jersey Shore were tasked, like every other show, on what to do on Valentine’s Day this year.  We’ve moved the show in a direction of being much more real, and more story-based.  Lou did some intel behind the scenes and found one of Shannon’s exes and invited him on the program to dish on Shannon so we could learn more about her.  This content is relevant, compelling, fun, and defines her character in a unique way.  Go be different around the great topics and get remembered for it.

Karen Carson in the Morning, WNEW-FM, New York City and Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh with The Super Bowl Shave Off

When you have a three-person show, you always have two people of the same gender and one common challenge.  You must separate their characters.  Case in point is Karen Carson in the Morning with Johnny Minge and Intern Anthony, WNEW-FM, New York and Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh.  Both shows have two guys and a challenge we face at both programs is developing different personas for each of the two gentlemen.  It’s first important to know how each is similar and different from the other and focus on the differences.  Then, there are things you can do to help accentuate that.  The week leading up to the Super Bowl, we set both guys in a competition with female-friendly Big Game trivia where the loser had to shave their head.  In both instances, we got a ton of repeat listening as we did a narrative arc that lasted the week and incredible engagement on social media.  Hear how both shows wrapped things up with the Super Bowl Shave Off on the Friday of that week.  Watch WRAL-FM’s final round on Facebook here and the actual shaving of Bryan’s head here.

 

Gregg, Freddy, and Danielle, MIX 104.1, Boston Telling Tom Brady Stories

In a time when listeners are less inclined to call radio stations, we must be more resourceful in creating entertaining breaks around the most relevant topics of the day.  Tom Brady retires again from the NFL and you’re a show in Boston, where Tom remains a star.  What do you do?  If you’re Gregg, Freddy, and Danielle, MIX 104.1, Boston, you use the resources right in front of you.  There’s a sports station in the building and one of the hosts was a Patriot and knows Brady.  The message here is use the resources around you to do your show.  Where they could have opened the phones and not known if they’d get anything good, they used the host to talk about Tom Brady in the first person.  A simple, yet very effective decision.

Sarah Pepper and Jessie Watt, KHMX, Houston Grandpa and Gizmo’s Wedding

You can’t tell a great story without at least one viable point-of-conflict.  A point-of-conflict that will draw the audience in and make your story electric.  The length of the break is also dependent on how many points-of-conflict you have.  Case in point is this great character break from Sarah Pepper and Jessie Watt, KHMX, Houston.  Jessie’s 80-year old grandpa got married again.  Their code name for the new bride is Gizmo because Jessie refuses to call her grandma.  This break is four minutes long but doesn’t feel it for several reasons.  First, this is excellent story-telling.  Within the first ten seconds, I know the topic and the main point-of-conflict.  Then, in Jessie’s telling, she adds drama around the main narrative with at least ten additional observations (other points-of-conflict).  You must have drama in stories to make them fun.  Add in great use of audio and this is real and highly entertaining because of how it was told and the details of the story.