Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

Let’s have some fun with the boss, shall we?  Karen, Johnny, and Intern Anthony, WNEW-FM, New York decided to prank their boss, Jim Ryan, on his birthday.  Normally you might think this is inside talk.  What listener knows Jim Ryan, the Brand Manager of the Audacy station?  But that’s irrelevant, because the team quickly changes this to a relationships bit and displays the silliness of their sense of humor with the Carvel cake prank they played on him.  Destinations, game plans, and prep help you get to what listeners want most, which are payoffs.  They’ll not spend much time allowing any show to talk around a topic if they don’t know where they are going.  So it’s irrelevant who the program director is.  What matters most is the audience relates to the topic (today is our boss’s birthday) and laughs at the funny prank they pull on him.

Mega Millions is the Hot List topic.  It’s worth over one billion dollars and you aren’t relevant unless you devote some content breaks to it so your audience aligns your show with an image of being relevant.  The big question is what will you do with that topic that you can own?  How do you treat it in a way where your audience laughs, possibly talks about the break, and also gives you an image of being imaginative without crossing the line of being a wacky radio show?  Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh decided to have the entire staff get in on the content.  Over the course of 45-minutes, they had the staff call their boss to “pre-resign” believing they would win the billion that night.  They then flipped it and had the audience do the same.  Pretty creative idea against a highly relevant topic.