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.
Every contemporary aged female has a gay best friend she can rely on for fashion and relationships advice, right? Well, there’s a sad segment of your female audience that has yet to connect with one. That’s why you can, on occasion, do “The Go To Gay”. Open the phones – only two kinds of people can call. Women without a gay best friend, and gay guys willing to adopt another straight female into their circle. Introduce one gal to one gay on the phone, then eavesdrop on the conversation. They don’t actually have to become friends in real life, but putting them together on the phone might be fun to listen to.
You’d be amazed at the names they give some fireworks. You may also be amazed at the names they give some sex toys. “The Punisher” and “The Golden Shower” are names of…fireworks. While “The Cone” and “The Orca” are sex toys. This is an easy game to do (use Google to find them) just back from the July Fourth holiday.
Morning shows always have these silly dilemmas listeners like to chime in on. Recently, instead of buying new ones, I took the batteries out of a hotel room TV remote because those in my portable radio went dead. Did I steal? These frivolous scenarios have a place on morning shows. At B101, Philadelphia, we’ve decided to put together a new feature to deal with these called “The Supreme Court of Grandmas”. We’re going to find a bunch of very opinionated grandmothers, who’ll be our Supreme Court and when we have these, and they’ll rule on them before we go to the phones.
The guys at Radio Now, Indianapolis did a fun thing with the Anthony Weiner texts. They had their stodgy 60-year old receptionist read some of the more “interesting” ones. They also recorded her reading some lyrics from L’il Wayne songs in a game called “Weiner or L’il Wayne” where the listener had to identify if what was being read was from the Weiner texts or a L’il Wayne song.