Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

We tease content for two reasons:  to extend listening with a provocative, intriguing tease.  The other is to make listeners who must leave the show wonder so they’ll return the next day out of a fear of missing something.  Often we think of an effective tease as one or two sentences.  What happens when content becomes your tease?  Iris and Grizz, KSII, El Paso, TX recently combined the two efforts very effectively.  They have a daily benchmark where Iris gives pickup lines centered around the biggest topics of the day.  Pennies will no longer be minted so Iris writes lines around the topic, then opens the phones (ChatGPT can help with this).  Listen to them here do content and how their chemistry drives the break, which leads to the tease of the actual lines.  I’m laughing at this break, so I’ll stay for the next.

Evolving story lines keep listeners hooked to stay to a conclusion.  Much like a TV show, we keep coming back because we want the ending.  This was the case with Zog and Ivy Unleashed, Power 96, Miami.  Zog shared on a Zoom that he’d gone to the mall to buy some T-shirts.  They only had a few in his size so he took those and the store shipped the rest.  When the package arrived at his home, he got all the ordered T-shirts as well as doubles for the ones he already had.  To many shows, this would be a one-off break.  But, we played with it.  When I asked the room what Zog should do, and if he were to keep them all if he were stealing, we were off to the races on a story line to hook the audience.  Break #1 is the dilemma and moral question, break #2 are calls with listeners chiming in, and, because he’s a good guy and doesn’t want the worker to get in trouble (keeping in character), break #3 is Zog calling the mall store to ask what he should do.  So instead of one break, we get three to extend listening with a story that has an unexpected conclusion.