Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

The best phone topics come not from a prep service, but from your life.  Prep service topics tend to be very generic and evergreen.  “Do you like Peeps?”  Nope, anyone can do that anywhere.  Your best topics, the things you want the audience to contribute to, come from stories you will tell about items going on in your life right now, with a pivot to then have the audience tell you their stories just like it.  Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston, are masters at doing this.  Dan on the show and Karson’s wife, Lana, have found side hustles.  Break one below is them telling their story.  Lana’s is collecting cans and Dan’s is one not very traditional when it comes to the topic.  Both are well-told stories by funny people. They engage the audience emotionally, then ask the audience to call in with theirs.  If there’s a recipe on how to do a phone topic, this is is it and it’s well done.

When you have a three-person show, you always have two people of the same gender and one common challenge.  You must separate their characters.  Case in point is Karen Carson in the Morning with Johnny Minge and Intern Anthony, WNEW-FM, New York and Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh.  Both shows have two guys and a challenge we face at both programs is developing different personas for each of the two gentlemen.  It’s first important to know how each is similar and different from the other and focus on the differences.  Then, there are things you can do to help accentuate that.  The week leading up to the Super Bowl, we set both guys in a competition with female-friendly Big Game trivia where the loser had to shave their head.  In both instances, we got a ton of repeat listening as we did a narrative arc that lasted the week and incredible engagement on social media.  Hear how both shows wrapped things up with the Super Bowl Shave Off on the Friday of that week.  Watch WRAL-FM’s final round on Facebook here and the actual shaving of Bryan’s head here.