WIL, St. Louis Name that Street
There are multiple ways to tell the audience you’re new to town. The standard way is to ask listeners where to get a great local pizza, etc. That can live for only so long before it becomes one-dimensional. Stacy and Jonah, WIL-FM (New Country 92.3), St. Louis have been in place as the new afternoon show in town for only a few months so we’re now looking for fresh ways to publicly learn the market and have some fun. Stacy’s mom recently visited for the first time. The streets are notoriously hard to say in the market given their French spellings. Which is why they had their longtime traffic guy, Captain Mack, give her the spellings of local roads and Stacy’s mom had to pronounce them. Goals served for being local, saying we’re new to town, and creating some fun.
March Madness is done, but there are a couple of breaks I thought you’d enjoy, both from Two Men and a Mom, WRAL-FM, Raleigh. The first is a simple break where Sarah tells Kyle and Bryan her bracket strategy. She is an NC State alum and knew little else about the teams involved in the tournament. That didn’t prevent her from picking winners, although her logic was odd, in a funny kind of way. The takeaway on this break is that when you are honest with the audience and comfortable to share that you have no idea what you’re doing, a playfulness and organic sense of humor appears. In the second break, the team crowns its winner of their parody, Starch Madness, where they looked for the most popular potato-based food item. After all the voting, the team decides to insert in the break a little unexpected Easter egg by using a personality from their sister TV station, who had an investigative bulletin. Surprises are nice in breaks and this is one of them to capture the imagination of the audience.
A first threshold by which listeners determine if an interview will be worth their time is if they know and like the person being interviewed. For any country audience, Scotty McCreery is on that list – he’s a star to them. Having the number one song in the format at the time of the interview increases the interview’s relevance. His interview with The Big Dave Show, B105, Cincinnati, is a textbook example of how to do an interview for the two groups of people listening: those who like and know Scotty and those who don’t. Instead of a typical interview where the person would come on and be asked about their inspiration for their current project (no one cares), they quickly congratulate him on being number one, note why he wrote the song (because his grandfather passed – they knew this from research) and then talked with Scotty about getting married, the new American Idol, and ran him through a fun quiz to see what he remembered about his time winning the show’s tenth season. All around, this was well thought out and done to make a very accessible five minute interview that was entertaining and engaging for all.
It’s important as a show to be on pop culture and reflect trends. The Throwback Thursday trend still works in social media. Seizing on this idea on Colleen and Bradley, myTalk107.1, Minneapolis, a radio station grounded in everything entertainment, we added a new, daily feature to this midday show called Throwback Live at 1:45. Holly the producer gets five audio clips of vintage pop culture. She plays a bit and then Colleen and Bradley compete head to head trying to guess what the audio is. It’s smart when you pit the cast against each other in a fun way as their chemistry will shine through. You’ll hear the throwback trend and all the fun in this version recently done.
It always helps to have fun experts on the show – they add to the entertainment factor of a break and give the cast something to play with. At Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston, Producer Mike was slated to marry two friends (he’s ordained). Mike hasn’t done that too much. So the show found a local justice of the peace they knew and asked him to participate in the break to give Mike advice. Great on paper, right? What adds to this is that the justice of the peace was very quick witted and knew the players so he could have fun with not only the scenario (he can tell stories about marrying people) but poke fun at Producer Mike, too, which made it more fun. When doing something like this, find experts in the field who can help your break have more sparkle.
Not that the concept always fits, but when we get stuck, we try to insert nudity or sex because that tends to make an idea better. Karlson and McKenzie, WZLX, Boston had a classic bit based around Heather Ford, their news person and voice-of-reason on the show, called Heather’s Hot Line. Heather would call a sex line in an effort to get the guy she was matched up with to do odd and weird things – the goal was to see how he’d react, in their efforts to create some uncomfortable drama so the audience leaned in to the hear what was next and laugh. Including sex/nudity doesn’t work for every brand, but considering this is a classic rock morning show targeting guys, it does.
The TJ Show, AMP 103.3, Boston has a cast in TJ, Loren, and Producer Matt who are just like the audience. We leverage this regularly to connect with listeners and do it in an entertaining way. It’s not good enough for them to know that TJ has a young daughter by the name of Charlie Jane. He regularly reminds them what kind of daughter he has – a kid just like theirs who throws fits when she doesn’t get her way and at times when you least expect it. This show is a master at vulnerability, bringing the audience into their world. TJ records his daughter throwing her fits as he attempts, as a loving father, to “negotiate” her out of crying, for a weekly feature called “Tantrum Tuesday”. A relatable topic being done in a truly unique way (like this) is very memorable.
It’s so much fun to create mischief. Especially when it’s around a topic of the day. Think Fallon or Ellen – that’s what they’re doing all the time – inserting their sense of humor into a Hot Topic listeners are either talking about or aware of. Enter The Josie Dye Show with Matt and Carlin, Indie 88, Toronto, who deftly took the topic of the Super Bowl and created some drama by calling people in the New England area, introducing themselves as being a representative of their cable company, and telling them that there would be no TV service Sunday evening between the hours of 5:00-8:00pm, right when the Patriots are playing. This was a fantastic concept on paper, easy to comprehend by the audience tuning in, very well executed, and garnered some classic reactions by Patriots fans expecting to see their team win their sixth Super Bowl.