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!
Fresh Out of Bed Head to Head
Looking for a substantive early show break to engage the audience and create an appointment? Fresh Out of Bed Head to Head is a trivia game pitting two listeners against each other in a vicarious break to create tune in. Rod Ryan, 94.5 The Buzz, Houston does this each morning with great success – thanks for the idea.
I Know an HVAC Guy
It’s the middle of summer. We’re living for air conditioning. And there are listeners who’s HVAC units aren’t working. Never more than now, they need the HVAC guy to show at the house to fix it. Get that emotion on your show by talking to those folks. Then, connect with an HVAC guy – they have a ton of great stories to tell, given they go to people’s homes! Call it I Know an HVAC Guy.
The Phone Fast
What might be fun is to choose a cast member and send them on a weekend Phone Fast. This is where they go old school – they give up their phone for an entire weekend to see what it’s like. Choose the cast member on your Friday show and ask a couple of listeners to do it with them, too. Then all gather Monday on the show to talk about what it was like to have a weekend without technology.
Hey Can I Do a Belly Flop?
If you have a nice heatwave come across your market, do Hey Can I Do a Belly Flop? Ask listeners who have pools to let one cast member come to their house during the show. The cast member does a belly flop into the pool during the show to cool off. It’s great audio for the show, super local, and will provide terrific visuals for a bunch of videos you can push out on your socials. Thanks to Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah, WRAL-FM, Raleigh for the idea!
Tales of the TSA
Ask any seasoned traveling and they’ll tell you that they hate airports in July. Mainly because it’s when families, who have little experience with the TSA, fly for vacation. Find a bunch of TSA agents (or ex-TSA agents) in your market to school them. TSA agents also have great stories from things they’ve seen. All terrific content.
The Mannequin of Death
See if you can get your hands on a mannequin and some fireworks. Then, partner with a local fire department, strap those bad boys on the mannequin, and prove how dangerous fireworks can be for the July Fourth holiday. It’d make a great video for your socials.
The Overshare Chair
Wanna do some deeper character development over the summer? Put some personal questions together and spin the big wheel to choose a cast member on the show. They pull three very personal questions out of the hat and sit in the Overshare Chair to reveal more of themselves to fans.
Here Now the News
With kids off from school, let’s put them to work over the summer with the new feature Here Now the News. In place of a newscast, bring a cute kid on and have them explain a serious news item to you. What do they know? How would they frame it? Cast kid reporters then go tackle a serious news item.
The Yard Sale of the Week
Lots of people have Saturday yard sales over the summer, selling the stuff they no longer need. Normally a homeowner advertises this by tacking notices on telephone poles in the neighborhood. What would it be like if, each Friday for the next few months, you let on someone who’s having a yard sale so they can promote it on your show? Making this small thing big on your program could be very homey and quite endearing.
Mission Somewhat Impossible
Tom Cruise’s final installment of the Mission Impossible series is number one at the box office. Final Reckoning is the eighth in the series, started in 1996. Find someone (a cast member?) and challenge them to watch every Mission Impossible movie, in the order they were released. We’ve already done that math (for the first seven): it’d take 15 hours, 32 minutes. Put them in a studio and start the challenge, timing it to end during your show. Then, if you can pull it off, grab some tickets and take lots of people to a matinee of the current and last release after that.