Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

One of your primary jobs is to make the audience care about you.  That’s why great character development is rooted in honesty and vulnerability.  You care about people you know and that’s why you reveal who you are to the audience.  To bring them closer.  There seems to be a mass shooting every week in America.  You may opt in on talking about one, but not another.  The bank shootings in Louisville last week were especially personal for George, Mo, and Erik, KILT-FM Houston.  Instead of this becoming about gun control or mental health, listen to how it’s personalized by George, who couldn’t get a hold of his son when the story broke.  His kid worked one block away and was on lock down.  It’s one thing to talk about a topic as serious as this.  It’s another to personalize it so humanly as is done here.  You leave knowing George better and caring about him.  Do that with your topics.

Lots of shows covered International Women’s Day a few weeks ago.  Whether you target women or not, this was appropriate as the topic was high profile, placing it as a rare exception to my belief that doing national this-and-that days is irrelevant.  Our job in radio is to connect with the audience from whatever position we have on any known topic.  Where most shows probably asked the audience to name a woman in life important to them or to acknowledge some prominent women in the community, Gregg, Freddie, and Danielle, MIX 104.1, Boston did things one better.  They introduced to the audience the women in each of their lives important to them.  Making this topic personal and hearing their pride as they talked with who they chose defined them, leaving the audience with a sense of each as human beings.  That’s taking a relevant topic and creating great character development.  It’s no harder than that!