With Valentine’s Day about one month away, how about doing “Ghosts of Valentine’s Day Past”? Set up a special phone line for guys who’ve wronged a woman in the past and need to apologize. Air the compelling audio you get off the phone line and facilitate a few public apologies on the show from guys to their former girlfriends the week of the holiday. Then, award each of them Valentine’s Day dinners with their current partners.
Relationships features and topics are the most universal you can do. Here’s a new feature called “Why Am I Single?” (a question lots of people ask about themselves). You put a listener on who runs down the list of their attributes (i.e. college grad, fluent in two languages, disease free, employed full time, 10th in the world in jujitsu). Then, open the phones for listeners to ask other questions about the caller (here’s where they pull the layers back on past relationships) and then they tell the listener why they might be single. It is very relatable and has a terrific vicarious aspect to it!
Do anything with cute sounding kids and you have yourself a feature. Kids are not immune to seeing and hearing almost everything about the biggest topics of the day. And it’s fun to hear them talk about it. In this new feature called “What Kids Know”, go find a bunch kids and just ask what they know about the biggest topic of the day. Between the internet, their parents, and friends, you’re bound to hear things that listeners will be engaged by, too. We heard this done around the topic of Tiger Woods and it was completely engaging to hear what those kids knew about the topic.
Back several years ago, average Americans would get raises on January 1. That hasn’t happened to lots of folks for years. Despite that, there’s no reason the morning show can’t help kids in this regard. Huh? Take calls from kids who feel like they deserve a raise in their weekly allowance. Then, conference call the kid with their parents and barter (negotiate) the kid getting more allowance, in return for doing more chores.
Less than two weeks away from Christmas, there are a group of people dreading the time as it winds down to the holiday: people who hate buying Christmas gifts or blow the chore off by grabbing a Whitman Sampler for those closest to them. Do a “Giftervention”. Have the offended party tell you a little about how bad a gift-buyer the person is, then call them to say so on-the-air! Then, have a personal shopping expert on the other line to help the confronted person buy a more appropriate gift!
“Did They Make It” is a simple, relationships-oriented game you can play. Listeners come on and tell you a brief (one or two sentence story) about something that once happened in a relationship they had (i.e. “my guy sat me down after we’d been together for three months and admitted that he once did jail time for drugs.”) and the show has to figure out if the relationship survived the story.
Games are good for morning shows, especially if other listeners can vicariously play along wherever they are. That’s the concept behind “Wheel of Fortune”. Viewers getting the puzzles while on their sofas before the contestants make it fun for everyone. That said, how about “Triple True or False”? Get a boatload of trivia questions and load up the phones. The winner is the first person who gets three correct in a row. Make them true/false so there’s a 50/50 chance they’ll get it right. You never repeat a question so if caller one gets only two right, the next caller gets new questions.
With the holidays upon us, a simple, but very effective character building bit is for the male co-host of the show to put his wife on the air so she can detail his list of things that need to be done around the house for the holidays. From cleaning to fixing things to anything else that needs to be done to prepare for visitors, this easy bit will position your guy as a regular Joe, who gets the same marching orders from his wife that listeners do. This, then, can morph into calls from female listeners who’ll detail the list they have for their guy. And you can be bold – find the guy of a female caller and obligate him publicly to the list, even checking back in a few days to see how he’s done. It’s real, and it’s real fun to eavesdrop on this kind of idea.
Lots of people go to Halloween parties. And lots of people hook up at Halloween parties. Have listeners call who’ve been lucky enough to experience such a thing and they must tell you the “character” of the person they slept with. Mojo in the Morning in Detroit did this – one person had gone to bed with Barack Obama, another did it with an Oompa Loompa, and one lucky guy romanced Barbara Bush last year!
Here’s a great character development bit called “Confessions of your Ex’s”. Each show member finds a former partner – they come on and admit something on the air about the show member. It’s vulnerable, revealing, and story-telling in a way that’ll define each person on the show and make them memorable!