Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

Great brands meet their customers wherever they are.  Look around any big website.  They tend to have, front and center, stories about (and links to) stuff around the Hot Topics of the day.  Great personality shows instinctively know where the audience is emotionally and where they should be on an given day on a topic.  Which brings us to Brian and Chrissy, WGNA, Albany.  It’s their first show after their Buffalo Bills lose to the Kansas City Chiefs in what was the greatest weekend for football ever.  There’s no need to say that so much of their audience was grieving over the loss.  So, that’s where Brian and Chrissy were, too, with their content.  Some of their benchmarks remained, but the rest of the show had Bills content and tapped into where their audience was emotionally.  Here’s one break which proves that (note how they start the break with audio to hook the audience).

In the construction of your breaks and in the dissection of the stories you tell on the show, where’s the conflict?  Who or what helps push your story line forward and can be the center of emotional engagement that draws listeners in?  Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh think of this in every break they plan on the show.  Sarah was due to have a girls weekend with college friends in Key West.  Yet, one of the friends invited another gal Sarah doesn’t like, and even considers an “energy vampire” so she’s thinking of bailing from the get together because of it.  A good story to tell for character definition because it’s honest and has conflict.  The show took things one step further – after Sarah tells her story and lays out the drama for the audience to comment on, they get on the friend in question so Sarah can ask why she did that.  This is “lean in content”.  And because it had conflict throughout, it garnered an emotional reaction from the audience both on the phones and in social media to make it more memorable to keep the show top-of-mind and “can’t miss”.  In your content breaks, where’s the bold conflict you can center things around so listeners are engaged and entertained?