Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

Wonderment and unique angles to big topics engage the audience.  What Will Smith did to Chris Rock was easily the biggest story last week.  Every show should have been on it a lot and from multiple angles to keep the audience interested.  In a brainstorm in our weekly call, while talking about the topic, we wondered, as did everyone, if the slap was choreographed and the entire episode staged.  That was part of the national conversation so we felt a need to address this, too.  The simple thing would be to ask listeners’ opinions.  Not a bad move.  What Lexi and Banks, KUBL, Salt Lake City did, though, was engage a body language expert found on Google who analyzed the video.  The gentleman they found came to this conclusion based solely on body language:  it was faked.  This is not only an engaging treatment of a big topic, it could get external press, too.

Sometimes, little things become big things.  Consider the mystery faced by Sarah and Jessie, MIX 96.5, Houston back in December.  Someone sent Sarah Pepper a self-help book from Amazon.  The only problem?  No one copped to it.  There wasn’t any receipt or note with the delivery acknowledging who sent it.  Small things can become big things.  And those big things can become defining things!  Sarah and Jessie set off to find out who sent the book and who thinks Sarah Pepper needs some help!  A question I often ask in a prep session to talent is:  what do you wonder about this?  Wonderment is a great place to start to come up with something creative.  They wondered if Sarah Frazier, Audacy’s market manager (and someone close personally to Sarah Pepper), sent it.  Ms. Frazier is always money on the air.  So they called her to ask.  Resulting in this tiny thing (getting a book from an unknown person) into a bigger, stickier thing, considering how much fun the conversation was.