With Lady GaGa having donned a meat suit at the VMAs, how about dressing someone from the show in just a swimsuit, lathering them up in meat juice, laying them down in a pen at the local animal shelter, and then letting in a bunch of dogs? The dogs will start licking and the person from the show will start laughing! If it works out, hilarity will ensue and you’ll have a segment listeners will walk away talking about!
With this the start of high school and middle school football, it might be great for each member of the show to adopt a high school or middle school (preferably in a hot zip code area) and track its progress all season. You don’t have to target teens to make this viable (as you can do it to appeal to parents, too). Ask listeners who you should choose, let there be web voting, ultimately grabbing one in an area of your metro you do well in. Then, follow the team all season, have players and coaches on, and appear at their big rivalry game. You’ll accentuate your “local” images, make stars of the team, and be rewarded with more listening by all.
If you have a major football team in your area (NFL or college), why not do on each Friday morning what they do in the locker room before the game? Pray to win! Find a nun (by either soliciting on-air or by asking on your Facebook site) who’ll come on each Friday morning and say a prayer that your local team wins each week. There are two keys here: you must find a nun who likes football and you must play it straight. The goal is to spice up the show with something unpredictable (a nun praying for a football game) and not to get into religion or make fun of her on the show!
Here’s a fun, recurring feature called “Ex-Boyfriend Poker”. Invite women to call about their ex-boyfriends. Put them on in pairs, giving each a sentence to tell you about why they dumped an ex-boyfriend (i.e. “I dumped an ex-boyfriend when I caught him cheating on me with my sister in our bed,” verses “I kicked an ex out for charging $1000 on my credit card without asking permission.”). Award a prize to the more intriguing of the two stories in each pair (because they have the better poker hand) and know that there are lots of follow up questions to make things come even more alive once you choose the better of the two.
Here’s a new feature being done by Candy & Potter at KMPS, Seattle called “Good Samaritan”. You must have three excellent prizes (all the same) and four listeners. One listener is your good samaritan. Offer them one of the great prizes. Then, the other three tell a quick, but emotional story as to why they should be given the prize (i.e. dog just died, about to get married and they’re not having a wedding). Make sure they’re coached off the air to heighten the impact of their story. After hearing the stories, the listener who you’ve given the prize to must make a decision; keep the prize for themselves (and the other three who told these quick stories get nothing) or give the prize up, thus becoming a good samaritan. If that happens, you then award the other two story tellers duplicate prizes. There’s great tension in this as the original listener must make a decision that others listening will play along with.
With kids going back to school, here’s a relatable idea for your entire audience. Have kids call a special phone line you set up (could just be your direct extension at the station) and give them 30-seconds to tell you what they did while on their summer vacations. Invite parents do do the same thing. Kids are always cute and the disparity against the adults will be amusing. The more you promote the line (on your show and throughout the day) the more you’ll get to air. This is better than a straight up phone topic because you won’t be at the mercy of what you just get that morning if you roll it out then.
For parents who are tired of their kids this summer, it’s the most wonderful time of the year – because it’s back to school season! Which is why you’ll play off this emotion by gathering audio from friends, co-workers, and listeners saying their name, their kid’s names, the school they’re going back to, and a quick, emotion-filled sentence about how they desperately want them out of the house and back to school and lay it over Johnny Mathis’s Christmas classic, “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”.
With commercials all over the place for Rosetta Stone, Stafford and Frigo, the morning team at The Fox in Jonesboro, AR, do a regular feature called “Time Out for Spanish”. They get a very quirky sentence read in Spanish. They air it and then translate it back to English. The fun factor happens with the quirkiness of what they write and the production value they place up against the feature to communicate its silliness.
Another fun Mel Gibson game played by Karson & Kennedy at MIX 104.1 Boston is called “Angry or Acting”. They got a bunch of Mel Gibson DVDs and pulled out scenes where Mel was acting angry (all the Lethal Weapons, Ransom). They played for the listener audio of either Mel angry (clips from the recently released phone calls) or Mel acting angry (the movie clips). Three of five right and the listener won, everyone in their cars laughing!
With the Mel Gibson audio being front and center, how about a fun game called “Know Your Celebrity Rants”. Give a two sentence rhyming clue and then play some of the audio of a celebrity rant (audio links to some below). The listener has to correctly guess three of five celebrities to win the prize. Karson & Kennedy at MIX in Boston did this and it was great. Some of the ones they used were Christian Bale, Alec Baldwin, Kanye West, Michael Richards, and Bill O’Reilly. Just make sure you choose very well known celebrities and more recent is better than old as you brainstorm the deeper list. Find some celebrity rants here, here, here, and here. Here the audio of how they did it here.