Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

Great shows are in the moment and perishable.  Sometimes the edgier topics (like the Trump-Ukraine controversy) need some innovation to tie into without angering either (or both) sides, claiming you took a position on politics they don’t agree with.  Enter Christine and Salt, 96.5 TIC-FM, Hartford who easily acknowledged that the phrase “quiz pro quo” is in our lexicon.  Everyone’s hearing it.  So it’s fair game to create content around it.  How to tie into it without being political, though?  They came up with a fun game call the Quiz Pro Quo.  They described things that could happen that rhymes with the phrase to give out a prize.  Listen to this break – they never mention Trump, Ukraine, impeachment, or even politics.  They acknowledged the phrase and do their version of it.  Hear the fun they have – and imagine the fun listeners are having, too, hearing this silliness.  All around a Hot Topic, which is highly important to do.  They could have done something generic or evergreen – but they went topical.  The more you are doing your version of these well-known topics, the more perishable your show will be.  And that’s a good thing.

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.