Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

A morning show recently suggested they don’t do interviews because interviews don’t work in PPM.  That’s an absolute to me so I challenged them.  Bad interviews don’t work as I’ve written on these pages.  Enter Hawkeye and Katelyn, KSCS, Dallas who presented the perfect opportunity to disprove that theory.  The show was just a few weeks away from Katelyn’s wedding.  So, we decided to do some character development around that fact.  Hawkeye gathered as many artist interviews as he could (the list is a who’s who:  Dan and Shay, Garth, Kenny Chesney, Jason Aldean, Kelsey Ballerini to name a few).  Along with a quick interview, he then pitched at each (without them knowing it was coming) that he would give them $750 if they would perform at Katelyn’s wedding.  This would be his gift to her.  We wanted to hear how the artists reacted the offer.  As you’d expect, every artist turned him down.  The fun came in listeners anticipating that moment.  The discomfort, and its subsequent humor, turned this from a regular Q&A into something both fun and strategic for character development.  Here is a recap break the show did on Katelyn’s first day back after the weekend ceremony.  They added Hawkeye’s voided check done throughout as a visual for social media, which you can see here.

If Dancing With the Stars offered you Sean Spicer for an interview, would you take it?  Or, because he’s politics and associated with the president, would you turn it down?  If you took it, what would you ask him?  Great shows are in the moment – they do content that two weeks from now feels stale.  Sean Spicer and Dancing With the Stars are “the moment”.  Christine and Salt, 96.5 TIC-FM, Hartford were offered the interview and accepted.  Their first question was asking if he knows how to spell “impeachment”, allowing Spicer to show his sense of humor.  They then explored his job, if he’d ever met Melissa McCarthy who played him on Saturday Night Live, and then the outrageous outfits they’re making him wear on the show.  The best part of all of this is that they leaned into the interview and saw its potential to grab the audience, instead of being worried about how it could harm them.  Be about “the now” with your show – know the big topics and what your take is on them to do the most relevant, contemporary program.  All the media around that you compete with are about what’s going on right now in the news and pop culture – and while some judgement will need to be used (not everything fits), talk through how you might do something so you stand out in the marketplace.