The Monday Morning Free Idea
Need fresh inspiration for show content?
Check back every Monday for The Free Idea—a fun, entertaining bit of inspiration to help your show connect with your audience even more. You can also view past ideas, many of which my clients and I successfully used to engage listeners.
Need help with that? Give me a shout!
The Crappy Candy House
When you were a kid, there was always one house in the neighborhood that gave out crappy candy (or worse, fruit!). Reminiscing around this could be a good phone topic. Even better is to locate one crappy candy house in a neighborhood, get the owner on, and outfit them with all the good candy they can use come Halloween.
Let’s Test the HOA
Does someone on the show live in a neighborhood with a stringent HOA? Go grab a very big Halloween inflatable from Home Depot. Have them set it up on the front yard and then let’s have a daily update on how long it takes before they’re flagged by the HOA. If no one on the show has an HOA, maybe a listener does.
The Candy Corn Pizza
We can have a long chat about appropriate toppings for a pizza. Wanna debate pineapple? How about a narrative story arc coming out of that phone topic where you dare to create the Candy Corn Pizza (disgusting picture here) and then get people at the station to try it out with audio for the show and a video for social media!
The Halloween Candy Countdown
Sixteen Halloween candies and a March Madness-style grid. Load them up, then commence the on-line and on-air voting to have listeners help you decide the penultimate, number one, most favorite Halloween candy.
Grandmas in the Haunted House
Does any local organization build haunted houses in your market to raise money for a charity? If so, grab some grannies and do Grandmas in the Haunted House. Take a bunch of grandmothers through it to see their reaction. With a night vision camera, record the whole thing. Air the best audio to intrigue people to head to social media to see the videos.
The Robert Redford Role Swap
The actor Robert Redford passed away last week. Go grab the audio of iconic scenes from some of this movies everyone knows and do the Robert Redford Role Swap. Play that scene for the audience, then have a guy you work with do their version of him inside the scene. Choose your grumpy engineer or opinionated male sales person.
Beat Your Boss
Here’s a fun new trivia-based game called Beat Your Boss. A worker convinces their boss to take them on in a trivia contest. If the boss wins, you give them a prize. If the worker wins, the boss has to give the worker a day off with pay!
The Travis and Taylor Wedding War
While they have yet to set a date, that doesn’t mean you can’t do content around Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s wedding. This one is the Travis and Taylor Wedding War. Find two wedding planners in town and tell them to put together a wedding for the couple. Tell them that, because the two are super rich, there is no budget so they can spend whatever they want. Check in with each wedding planner through the week. They both come back to share the details. Listeners then vote online which wedding is better for the celebrity couple.
The Radar Run
With schools back in session, time for The Radar Run. Partner up with your local police department. Camp outside an elementary school one morning and have them clock how fast cars fly by, all in an effort to remind people to slow down around schools. John and Tammy, KSON, San Diego do this big. Here’s a social media video of all they put into it.
Breaking Into the Billboard
Is there an electronic billboard somewhere in town where they will let you run it for a morning? As kids head back to school, take calls from moms talking about what school their kid is enrolled in. Then, give her, the kid, and the school props on the billboard for five minutes before you switch it out.