Tony and Kris, WIVK, Knoxville The Golf Ball Drop Decides the Winner

It’s really important to be topical.  Being about the moment makes your show sound connected and relevant.  Think of the nightly comedians.  Minus political comedy (which doesn’t fit most radio shows), they create humor around whatever topics are hot right now.  That’s a smart approach to prepping your show, too.  The week of the Masters, Tony and Kris, WIVK, Knoxville decided the audience deserved to know who’d win before the iconic weekend golf tournament started.  So they wrote the names of each golfer on a ball, dropped them down a flight of stairs, and whichever one their producer Cody grabbed first was predicted to be the winner.  Think Topic-Treatment-Tone (as espoused by my friends at Coleman Insights).  The topic was perfect, but the treatment (the idea) was meant to ramp up the laughter and talk.  Here’s audio of the break.  They did a companion video that was released on social media, too, to extend the life of the idea.

Gregg, Freddy, and Danielle MIX 104.1, Boston The Oops Moment

What’s fun is hearing listeners call themselves out when they’ve stumbled in life and done something stupid.  Your show and its cast are elevated when you do the same with the audience; make them the star.  That’s why it’s critical, even in these days when so much effort is put on social media engagement with your fans, that you continue to cultivate great story telling on the phones so listeners add to your program’s content.  In this regular feature as done by Gregg, Freddy, and Danielle, MIX 104.1, Boston’s great afternoon show, they ask the audience to call with their oops moment and tell them a time they did something completely inane and left embarrassed by it.  The show asks all the appropriate questions to create the fun.

Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh They Already Won in Australia

My blog this week is Practice Makes Permanent.  In it, I talk about the value of curiosity to get a more creative show.  Surrounding yourself with curiosity always leads to more fun things to do around a topic.  Case in point was what was done last week by Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh.  The big topic in the Triangle was the Final Four match-up that weekend between Duke and UNC, two local teams.  It’s all anyone talked about.  In one of our Curiosity Zooms, when discussing the topic, someone noted that it’s always the next day in Australia.  Which lead to our deciding to call a friend there the day before the game.  They noted to him that, because it’s the next day, the game had already been played and asked who won (he said UNC).  Many listeners got the joke, but a few didn’t, which resulted in one calling the show a little confused.  Do fun and different things with your big topics and there’s no way you can’t stand out.

Lexi and Banks, KUBL, Salt Lake City Will Smith’s Slap Was Faked

Wonderment and unique angles to big topics engage the audience.  What Will Smith did to Chris Rock was easily the biggest story last week.  Every show should have been on it a lot and from multiple angles to keep the audience interested.  In a brainstorm in our weekly call, while talking about the topic, we wondered, as did everyone, if the slap was choreographed and the entire episode staged.  That was part of the national conversation so we felt a need to address this, too.  The simple thing would be to ask listeners’ opinions.  Not a bad move.  What Lexi and Banks, KUBL, Salt Lake City did, though, was engage a body language expert found on Google who analyzed the video.  The gentleman they found came to this conclusion based solely on body language:  it was faked.  This is not only an engaging treatment of a big topic, it could get external press, too.

Tony and Kris, WIVK, Knoxville That’s All I Need to Know About You

Tony and Kris, WIVK, Knoxville do a daily feature called That’s All I Need to Know About You.  Each of us make daily, private judgments about people when we see them do something we think is stupid.  The guys are great observationalists and this plays off that strength.  Considering that real life is a treasure trove of terrific content, they offer up some inane thing they saw someone do and then tag on the hook line, “that’s all I need to know about you.”  The show then flips and asks the audience to call in with theirs, highlighting more content from listeners’ everyday lives.  This makes the program more relatable and more fun because listeners can go off on the inanity around them with others tuning in nodding yes and laughing along, heightening our relatable and authenticity images.

Sarah and Jessie, MIX 96.5, Houston with Who Sent That Self-Help Book?

Sometimes, little things become big things.  Consider the mystery faced by Sarah and Jessie, MIX 96.5, Houston back in December.  Someone sent Sarah Pepper a self-help book from Amazon.  The only problem?  No one copped to it.  There wasn’t any receipt or note with the delivery acknowledging who sent it.  Small things can become big things.  And those big things can become defining things!  Sarah and Jessie set off to find out who sent the book and who thinks Sarah Pepper needs some help!  A question I often ask in a prep session to talent is:  what do you wonder about this?  Wonderment is a great place to start to come up with something creative.  They wondered if Sarah Frazier, Audacy’s market manager (and someone close personally to Sarah Pepper), sent it.  Ms. Frazier is always money on the air.  So they called her to ask.  Resulting in this tiny thing (getting a book from an unknown person) into a bigger, stickier thing, considering how much fun the conversation was.

Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh We’re Rooting For You

Just coming off two years of Covid, with so many people isolated from the world except for what they had on Zooms, there is a general sense of isolation and loneliness.  Here’s where radio has shined.  Our ability to connect with listeners is unparalleled.  That’s why so many in the audience feel like they know us.  You must have that for this break to happen.  Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh have a vibe about their show where they root for people.  That’s who they are in real life, which is why it so easily transfers on-air.  This is a very simple phone topic that gets immensely human and personal.  A listener is starting a diet because she’s tired of how she looks. The show becomes very supportive of her.  That’s when she cries in front of them.  Because she knows they’re rooting for her.  Do you have that kind of relationship with your audience?

Wicker and Wilde, MIX 98.1, Richmond Finding Atlas the Dog

There’s this old adage in radio that small market stations want to sound big and big market stations want to sound small.  In the latter, “small” means homey.  All radio should sound personal.  If you’re a person of a certain age reading this post, you’ll remember when hometown stations would let listeners get on-the-air and ask the audience for help in finding their lost dogs.  That’s exactly what Wicker and Wilde, MIX 98.1, Richmond did recently.  A listener lost his dog Atlas and he asked for the audience’s help in finding him.  Which resulted in this narrative theme over one show where listeners called with Atlas sightings and the resolution at the end of the program where the dog and owner were reunited.  So homey and touching – with anyone listening that day wondering if there was a happy ending.  This is wonderfully touching radio and super local.

Gregg, Freddy, and Danielle, MIX 104.1, Boston with Gram’s Jams

Anytime you come up with an idea centered around the music you play, it scores well with the audience and ties you back to the overall brand images of the radio station.  Gregg, Freddy, and Danielle, MIX 104.1, Boston afternoons, wanted to play the often-used simple game of reading a song lyric to the audience and having the listener give back the artist and title to win a prize.  That’s been done a million times, right?  Add in a cast member’s grandmother, who’s reading the racy lyric, and you do both character development and earn an image of being fun, and you shift the feature from being a pure promotional giveaway to the earning of images with the entire audience.  Especially important for those not trying to win the prize, but still wishing to be entertained by what they hear.

Mark and NeanderPaul, KSLX, Phoenix Dirty Pics to the Pastor

The origin of your breaks communicate your relevance.  Using a Hot List topic to generate your break connects both you and the audience to whatever is going on in life right now.  Mark and NeanderPaul, KSLX, Phoenix used the story of Patriots Coach Bill Belichick getting in trouble for sending a text to talk with the audience about the texts they’ve sent that weren’t proper.  As some things go, this became about the inappropriate nude pictures sent to others.  Here’s a fun story told by a female listener to the guys about naked pictures she accidentally sent to a group text, which included her pastor.  The start is the Belichick story, but the end has the focus on a listener, making her the star of their program.  Note her nice compliment to the show at the end of the call.  She shared that personal story because she feels like she knows the people on the show, key to her calling.