Archive for category: Audio

The most entertaining guests on the show sometimes live on the fringe.  When they are family of cast members, they also provide character development.  Letterman taught us the importance of finding the colorful people around the show and figure out how to get them on so their oddities can capture the audience’s attention.  John and Tammy, KSON, San Diego have some very fun family members.  John’s daughter, Abby, just became a a vegan.  This lifestyle is distant from the typical country partisan.  So, John decided to interview his daughter to find out what that was like, and, loaded up with things to say, Abby judged the audience and created both fun and character development for her father in the process.  Bottom line:  look for the fun, odd people around you and introduce them to the audience to create some electric content.  Here’s the break to hear how it’s done.

A critical element to create great content is conflict – be it real or manufactured for fun.  Content segments without that push and pull of tension do little to grab the audience emotionally, which is the one thing that will both intrigue them to hear it (hence, a powerful set-up or hook at the very beginning of the break) and provide a resolution to that dramatic thesis at its end.  For Father’s Day last month, Lexi and Banks, K-BULL 93, Salt Lake City had the typical giveaway packages from the promotions folks.  Not content to play a silly game or take caller X, they fished through social media looking for listeners who had borrowed money from their fathers and not paid it back.  That was the thesis of real life drama they would use to tell a story, tie into Father’s Day, and get dad and and their kid on to give something out.  Mining the story from both perspectives, as you will hear below, is appropriate and relatable.  But at the end, they asked the father to forgive the “loan” in return for the prize package, thus providing resolution.  All around, this is very well conceived and executed by the team!

You can tell someone else’s story, or get them to tell it themselves – which one is better to you?  Obviously, it’s the latter.  When you hear a great story, make the effort to get the person who experienced the story to come on your show and explore it with them.  Doing so brings you a deeper level of honest storytelling, you find out more details which makes the story come to life, and there’s much more emotion to it.  You might have seen the viral video of Chris Swanson, the Flint, MI cop who took off his riot gear to be with protestors.  Instead of just talking about it, John and Tammy, KSON, San Diego convinced him to come on the show to tell his story.  Hearing his voice made all the difference because he lived it and it ended up being pro-cop, a lost perspective with all the protests.  This changed the break from C-level to A-level.  We all must be better at this kind of prep.  Doing this makes the break much more memorable and gives you something around the topic to totally own.

You cannot ignore the protests.  Some shows fear tackling a topic as big as this, but to build a brand in 2020, you must take a stand.  Don’t conflate taking a stand against racism or for the Black Lives Matter movement with politics.  You can easily wade into the former with your honest feelings without ever touching Trump.  After all, who’d call to say they would no longer listen because they were for racism?  Part of connection around a topic of this size is first being honest with the audience, and then understanding the tone with which you deliver your perspective moderates any “stop listening moment” your audience could have.  John and Tammy, KSON, San Diego handled this perfectly last week when they admitted to listeners that as white people, they truly don’t understand what it’s like to be African American.  So they found a black pastor to come on the show to teach them what they did not get in their everyday American experience.  This never became about politics – it was affirming, uplifting, positive, and, at its end, might even move you to cry.  This is relevance – not fearing the topic, but thinking through how to present it so the audience leaves understanding your values as someone they wish to wake up with everyday on the radio.

You might be doing lots of interviews with the Covid issue.  Compelling and interesting story-telling with experts and listeners really resonate with the audience.  But, you don’t get there by accident and certainly cannot make it happen without prep.  There is a very compelling TV commercial featuring a nurse at a Hartford-area hospital (here).  It is immensely powerful and paints the picture of a day in her life for viewers.  Christine and Salt, 965, TIC-FM, Hartford decided they wanted to talk with Nurse Sophia, considering how moved they were by the commercial.  A good first step in doing an interview is that you must be moved.  What aids this interview is that they are curious people – not on the surface (i.e. tell us what time you wake up, what time do you get to work – these are the kinds of questions that signal you never prepped to figure out how you’d explore her story – so Nurse Sophie could expose her true life past what we see in the spot).  As you will hear in this interview, the team probed about what it was like to be in a room with a Covid patient and what her life was like when she went home after experiencing that each day.  They went deep and you must, too, if you will do an interview that will be impactful, emotional, memorable, and lasting for the audience.