The Monday Morning Free Idea
Need fresh inspiration for show content?
Check back every Monday for The Free Idea—a fun, entertaining bit of inspiration to help your show connect with your audience even more. You can also view past ideas, many of which my clients and I successfully used to engage listeners.
Need help with that? Give me a shout!
Here Now the News
With kids off from school, let’s put them to work over the summer with the new feature Here Now the News. In place of a newscast, bring a cute kid on and have them explain a serious news item to you. What do they know? How would they frame it? Cast kid reporters then go tackle a serious news item.
The Yard Sale of the Week
Lots of people have Saturday yard sales over the summer, selling the stuff they no longer need. Normally a homeowner advertises this by tacking notices on telephone poles in the neighborhood. What would it be like if, each Friday for the next few months, you let on someone who’s having a yard sale so they can promote it on your show? Making this small thing big on your program could be very homey and quite endearing.
Mission Somewhat Impossible
Tom Cruise’s final installment of the Mission Impossible series is number one at the box office. Final Reckoning is the eighth in the series, started in 1996. Find someone (a cast member?) and challenge them to watch every Mission Impossible movie, in the order they were released. We’ve already done that math (for the first seven): it’d take 15 hours, 32 minutes. Put them in a studio and start the challenge, timing it to end during your show. Then, if you can pull it off, grab some tickets and take lots of people to a matinee of the current and last release after that.
Scratch It for the Graduate
Graduation is upon us. Put listeners on whose kids are graduating, letting them gush. Then, if they’re going to college, have a scratch off lottery ticket, and reveal what they’ve won to apply against their grad’s college education!
Men Can’t Morgan, But Women Can Wallen
Morgan Wallen is the hottest thing right now in country music (and some crossover formats). He just released the behemoth of an album (37 tracks). Time to tap in around this Hot Topic with Men Can’t Morgan, But Women Can Wallen. Using his hits, get men and women to do karaoke separately to prove the thesis that men can’t sing his songs, but women can.
Pope or Nope
So, what do you know about the new Pope? It’d be easy to just recite facts that you read online to your audience. But, playing Pope or Nope is better. Get a bunch of listeners on, then quiz them fact by fact. Is it “pope” or “nope”. Thanks to Elizabeth and Radar 99.1 The MIX, Milwaukee for this idea. Hear it on the kick ass audio page.
Certificates of Manchievements
With the weather turning nice, lots of husbands or boyfriends will work honey-do lists of things that need to be handled around the house. For guys who do those, bring their wife/girlfriend on each Monday to grade his job and offer up a Certificate of Manchievement.
The Mother of All Karaoke Performances
Got a prize to give out for Mother’s Day (May 11)? How about The Mother of All Karaoke Performances? Invite in a bunch of moms to do karaoke on the show that week. Take votes online and from callers. The mother with the most votes wins the prize you have.
Mama Drama Masterclip Theater
A fun twist on the acting out of a famous scene in a movie for Mother’s Day is Mama Drama Masterclip Theater. Go get those scripts from the internet and have two mothers you work with act it out (with a production value, of course, to dress it up) before listeners guess the movie. That makes doing this idea topical when the holiday comes up and gives you a shot to chat with the moms first!
Nude Spring Cleaning
Anytime you add nudity to an idea, it’ll work! Lots of folks will do some spring cleaning now that April is here. Engage in a competition amongst the show cast where the loser has to spring clean their home nude and provide one picture of them doing it for social media (of course any private parts are obscured).