Listeners like to play along with games on morning shows. Games are vicarious and help wake listeners up. Karson and Kennedy, at MIX 104.1, Boston, came up with a fun, easy game called “Did They Say ‘I Do’?” You give the listener the celebrity couple and the listener has to tell you if they actually got married or are just dating or living together.
What’s always fun? To freak out family members! “The Bail Game” does just that. Your listener is conferenced in with a family member (a parent, preferably, as they’ll have the best reaction). They must tell that family member that they’ve been arrested and need a large sum of money for bail. If the family member freaks, they win a prize!
With the economy still in question, here’s a great character building bit that’s also quite vulnerable. The entire morning team should run their credit reports. Once done, give the listeners the scores and they must match them up to the cast member, which is when details emerge on how each person on the show is faring.
Labor Day Weekend is almost here. How about finding five women who are due to give birth over the weekend. Get to know them and their husbands throughout this week. The first mom to give birth over the weekend wins a prize. You can have all of them on your Tuesday show (the day after the holiday) for an update! You can call this “Labor Day, Labor Day”.
With the stock market in turmoil, go grab three cute school kids, give them each $100, and marry them up with a financial trader in your market. Introduce the teams to the audience on a Monday. Tell each team they must day trade for one week (they have to buy/sell at least one stock each day). Check in with them daily. Whatever money the kids have left the following Monday they get to keep for school clothes and supplies.
How about a couple of back to school ideas? Want to really connect with moms? Open the phones and ask moms to call and read you the list of things they have to buy their kid as they get ready to go back to the classroom. Take one and edit it in such a way that you “take breaks” from hearing her list to play music or commercials, then return to her in between those elements for a half hour so it sounds like the list has 1000 things on it! Another idea is to find one mom with a list and get the person at your local newspaper who covers how to save money by coupons and figure out how she can save tons of cash on her list.
Here’s a fun game J & Julian at B96, Chicago came up with for the return last week of “Jersey Shore”. It’s called “The Jersey Shore Whore”. It’s got edge, plays off the big topic, and is easy to follow along. You describe a cast member of the show, the listener has to identify who it is. Make sure to have audio from the program to help add some dimension as you play.
This isn’t fun, but it’d be very poignant. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is but six weeks away. This year, it’s on a Sunday. Centered around the morning show, stage the largest gathering in your market of people to sing the National Anthem. Being a Sunday, folks will be in a very reflective mood for this milestone anniversary. Your being the center point to pulling this off will make you quite rememberable.
It’s time to “Talk Sexy in Spanish”. No doubt Spanish is a very sexy language. Write some sexy sentences in Spanish (“I want to caress and hold you all night, my love”) and then write some very non-sexy ones, too (“I just save 15% on my car insurance by calling Geico”). Read each to one listener in your sexiest voice. The listener has to guess if you did, indeed, say something sexy in Spanish. If they get three of five right, they win.
With our being in summer travel mode, lots of families are heading out on vacation. Each week until the end of the summer, solicit from your audience a mom to call with kids (cute-sounding age) who are headed out on vacation that weekend. Get the mom to get one of her kids to leave you a voicemail each night of their vacation the following week. All the kid has to do is read down the list of everything they did that day. Then, grab the voicemail when you get in and air it during your show to reflect what families are up to this summer.