Matt, Gabe, and Captain Ron, KKWF (The Wolf), Seattle with Operation K-9 Companion

You might be doing a community service project now to show your heart.  That’s a smart move to rally the audience to help you reach some goal to make the community a better place.  Listeners are searching for any reason to feel better about their town, those less fortunate, and themselves.  Your event probably does all of that.  Matt, Gabe, and Captain Ron, KKWF (The Wolf), Seattle just wrapped up their annual effort called Operation K-9 Companion where they ask the audience to help them buy and train service animals for soldiers who are home with PTSD.  Lots of country stations do this – it’s a great event.  This year, the team rallied their listeners to help them raise over $400,000 in one week.  That number is outstanding.  I reminded them that this week-long effort is not a fundraising event.  It’s a story-telling event.  Tell stories and you’ll motivate more people who are inclined to give to do so.  You’ll also elevate the images of your show with those who won’t.  Below are two stories told that showcase two very different emotions.  In the first, they surprise the woman who runs the organization with her mom, who beams with pride.  In the other, a soldier tells a tough story about how his service dog passed away.  Both stories have intense emotions, elevating things for the team.

Iris and Grizz, KSII, El Paso, TX with Content that Becomes the Tease

We tease content for two reasons:  to extend listening with a provocative, intriguing tease.  The other is to make listeners who must leave the show wonder so they’ll return the next day out of a fear of missing something.  Often we think of an effective tease as one or two sentences.  What happens when content becomes your tease?  Iris and Grizz, KSII, El Paso, TX recently combined the two efforts very effectively.  They have a daily benchmark where Iris gives pickup lines centered around the biggest topics of the day.  Pennies will no longer be minted so Iris writes lines around the topic, then opens the phones (ChatGPT can help with this).  Listen to them here do content and how their chemistry drives the break, which leads to the tease of the actual lines.  I’m laughing at this break, so I’ll stay for the next.

David, Sue, and Kendra, Magic 107.7, Boston with Sal and His Apple Trees

There is content all around you.  As you engage people at the station or in life, listen out for stories to tell and quirky characters to put on.  In Boston, Sal the Boss is a character on every show in the Audacy cluster.  Sal always brings great stories, a swagger and attitude, and a terrific sense of humor.  One of Sal’s passions is his apple trees.  Each fall, he picks his apples and gives them away to those at the stations.  So this year, David, Sue, and Kendra, Magic 107.7, Boston had him come in to talk about it.  They then blindfolded Sal, made him take bites of apples, and he had to identify the type of apple it was.  This was fun audio, but an ever better video for social media.  The audio is below and the video is here.

Zog and Ivy Unleashed, Power 96, Miami with Is Zog a Thief?

Evolving story lines keep listeners hooked to stay to a conclusion.  Much like a TV show, we keep coming back because we want the ending.  This was the case with Zog and Ivy Unleashed, Power 96, Miami.  Zog shared on a Zoom that he’d gone to the mall to buy some T-shirts.  They only had a few in his size so he took those and the store shipped the rest.  When the package arrived at his home, he got all the ordered T-shirts as well as doubles for the ones he already had.  To many shows, this would be a one-off break.  But, we played with it.  When I asked the room what Zog should do, and if he were to keep them all if he were stealing, we were off to the races on a story line to hook the audience.  Break #1 is the dilemma and moral question, break #2 are calls with listeners chiming in, and, because he’s a good guy and doesn’t want the worker to get in trouble (keeping in character), break #3 is Zog calling the mall store to ask what he should do.  So instead of one break, we get three to extend listening with a story that has an unexpected conclusion.

George, Mo, and Erik with a K with The 6:10 Amen

In some regional training I did this past week with talent from Chicago and Milwaukee, the room discussed the power of good news.  Strategically, when the world is on fire and negative news is seemingly everywhere, your profiling the good things going on in listeners’ lives sets you apart from all that and reinforces to your fans that, despite a world of stress, you can be the outlet for good stuff.  Many in radio do this feature under a variety of names.  This is one of my all-time favorites.  George, Mo, and Erik with a K, 100.3 The Bull, Houston did the 6:10 and 8:10 Amen.  It’s a great feature name for a country station in Texas.  Here, they ride along to celebrate a listener calling in with her good news of getting a house.  Anytime you show interest in what’s going on in the lives of your listeners, you will win.

Chris and Dina, WMAS-FM, Springfield MA with Here’s Why I’ve Been Gone

Each of us in radio have call letters that will always be meaningful.  Today’s audio comes from one for me because this is where I started my morning show career, when on-the-air.  I jokingly say that it took this station firing me, then re-hiring me, then my leaving for things to click professionally.  Chris and Dina, WMAS-FM, Springfield, MA own every single demo in the market.  They have large leads because they are excellent broadcasters, understating why listeners tune in each day – what they’re looking for.  And central to that is connection.  They are deeply connected to the audience because they share their lives with their fans.  Dina went missing for a few weeks because her mom unexpectedly passed away.  It’s powerful to talk about something like this with the audience as it’s pure character development and very emotional.  Here’s Dina sharing with the audience what happened.  Her mom was a big part of the show so, Chris tilted the sadness at the end by re-airing a time she was on that was fun to hear again.

Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh with The Winner Happens In the Future

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.

Moug and Karla, B96, Chicago with The Etsy Witch

Your Cubs are in the MLB playoffs (Hot Topic) and you want to align with it in a unique, fun way to make people talk.  This one is pure silliness, which is why I like it.  Moug and Karla, B96, Chicago went to Etsy and found a witch to put a hex on the opponent’s of the Chicago Cubs baseball team.  Who even knew that getting a witch on Etsy was a thing?  Even if it isn’t, this creative approach to the topic is the perfect way to make fans stop to listen and, if done well like this, leave talking about it.  Choosing the topic is the first part of a great break.  To make it strategically successful, it’s the treatment you bring that makes it memorable.  Here are two installments of The Etsy Witch from this past week.

The Morning Wolfpack, 100.7 The Wolf, Seattle with AI Predicts the Mariners Win

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.

Scotty Kay, US99, Chicago with A Party at Michael Jordan’s House

I love innovators and those who see ideas in the oddest of places.  That’s why I fell in love when Scotty Kay, US99, Chicago called to get my help on one of the quirkiest ideas I’d ever heard.  Scotty found Michael Jordan’s old Chicago house on Airbnb.  Think of how iconic it’d be for listeners to get into the house once owned by one of Chicago’s most famous people.  What to do?  Scotty decided to throw a concert at Michael Jordan’s old house.  The narrative was set.  The owner of the house said it’d be okay, his boss said no.  As a renegade, Scotty moved forward, finding a group to do it and mapping out the promotion.  One thing we don’t do enough of in radio any longer is capture the imagination of the audience and create experiences in our promotions that make listener’s eyebrows go up.  What I loved was the pure innovation of this idea, which came solely from Scotty finding the listing online.  Bravo.