Listeners always like to play along – if you do things that are vicarious, they’ll lean in, you will emotionally engage them, and you have them hooked for that break. Slacker and Steve, Alice 105.9, Denver, play a fun game with listeners. It’s called “Drunk or a Kid”. Listeners call and tell the show a story about something they did when they were either a drunk or a kid. The show then has to guess. The listeners will do that, too.
Some of the best ideas happen when you marry opposites. Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” video is now up to 60-million views on YouTube. It’s racy, over-the-top, and being talked about. This week’s Free Idea comes compliments of Kyle of Kyle and Rachel, Radio NOW, Indianapolis, who suggests you show the video to polite, courtly grandmothers to get their aural reaction as they watch it.
Sometimes the really fun ideas come out of a simple statement someone makes. My neighbor, talking about her three kids returning to school in the next week, said, “Kids go dumber over the summer.” So we have something for the show! Talk to moms with kids in the car headed off to a new school year. The kid comes on and tells you the grade they’re going into. Find out if the kid went dumber over the summer by asking them questions from the grade they graduated from a few months ago.
With county fairs about to start, Rob and Joss, Froggy 92.9, Santa Rosa, CA played a fun game with listeners. They went to their fair and talked with kids, just as they left a ride, and asked them to describe it for the audience, who then had to guess the name of the ride. What’s brilliant about this is that they got the kids at their emotional peak, just off a fun ride they went on, so you heard that in their voice.
We’re just days away from kids going back to school. Find the exact dates certain schools go back in session in your market. Then pick a morning and invite moms who drop their kids off at school to come to the station before heading to work for your first annual Botox Party. Give moms a shot of Botox for what they endured having their kids around all summer.
Seems like most people we know all have side jobs. A small thing they do in their spare time to earn a few extra hundred dollars a month. Might not be a bad idea to find out what these are by asking listeners about their “side hustles”.
In a conference call this past week, a morning show and I were talking about our summer vacations and, more specifically, airline travel. Each of us had a story to tell about how much we hate the airlines. That’s when we went in the opposite direction to develop an idea. Let’s let the airlines complain about us! This show happens to be in a market with two hubs (American Airlines and Southwest) so we have a large body of flight attendants and pilots who can tell their horror stories; the ones they tell their fellow airline employees about how bad we are. You don’t need that to do this. Generate great stories around the Hot Topic of summer vacations with this idea.
This one is way too easy. Give a list of celebrity names to your partner once the listener is introduced to the audience to play “The Celebrity Name Game”. They must name eight of the celebrities in sixty seconds with your partner giving clues to win. That your partner sees the list cold will give added tension to the execution.
Ask lots of moms and dads and they’ll tell you their kids watch the movie “Frozen” over and over and over and over again. And privately, they’re in hell because they have to watch it, too. Create, with an appropriate production value, “Frozen Prison” and invite listeners who are also there to call to tell you. Assign them a prisoner number and place them in a cell, under protective custody.
We’re in summer mode with lots of families headed for vacation in the next ten weeks. Ask the kids of coworkers to leave you a voicemail before they go to sleep while on vacation each night reading you the list of things they did while on break that day. You’ll get everything from the mundane (“went to the pool”) to exciting (“went horseback riding”). Produced right, you’ll have a fun lifestyle feature to play each day for the audience who can relate.