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 Mother of All Karaoke Performances
Got a prize to give out for Mother’s Day (May 11)? How about The Mother of All Karaoke Performances? Invite in a bunch of moms to do karaoke on the show that week. Take votes online and from callers. The mother with the most votes wins the prize you have.
Mama Drama Masterclip Theater
A fun twist on the acting out of a famous scene in a movie for Mother’s Day is Mama Drama Masterclip Theater. Go get those scripts from the internet and have two mothers you work with act it out (with a production value, of course, to dress it up) before listeners guess the movie. That makes doing this idea topical when the holiday comes up and gives you a shot to chat with the moms first!
Nude Spring Cleaning
Anytime you add nudity to an idea, it’ll work! Lots of folks will do some spring cleaning now that April is here. Engage in a competition amongst the show cast where the loser has to spring clean their home nude and provide one picture of them doing it for social media (of course any private parts are obscured).
The IRS Over/Under
Find a provocative question for the IRS with Tax Day approaching (i.e. I work at a strip club and want to get a breast enhancement – is the procedure deductible). Call the IRS first thing when you come on to see how long it takes to get an actual human on the phone to answer the question. Then run this as a show theme. The best part is you can call the IRS now and present it as live.
Easter Egg Butts
With Easter about a month away, create a competition between the male members of the show or station where the loser must pose for a picture for social media called Easter Egg Butts. See an example here.
March Sadness
The NCAA basketball tournament is front and center for the next few weeks. What’s your parody of it? How will you be topical and engage the audience? At some shows, we’ve chosen 16 of the saddest songs ever written and will whittle it down with lots of digital and on-air engagement to find the winner of March Sadness.
The Irish Booth Annoucner
What might be fun is to find someone with an Irish accent and have them be your booth announcer on St. Patrick’s Day on Monday, March 17. They talk you into stop sets live with teases for what’s next, talk out of stop sets to re-introduce the show, and do all promos and sweepers.
Five Things
With Elon Musk asking federal workers what five things they accomplished last week at work, you should do the same. Have your spouses/partners ask you, ask female listeners to ask their guys (air them together), ask your co-workers!
The Long Chew Challenge
Given the pressure of the world, if you need a stupid and inane idea, do the Long Chew Challenge. Go buy ten brands of gum and find ten people in the building who’ll chew it and log how long it takes before each piece runs out of flavor. Catalog everything. All in your effort to find the brand of gum that lasts the longest.
The Pothole of Pennies
With all the talk of no longer making pennies, here’s one you can plan on once winter is over in your market. Find a big pothole somewhere in the metro. Let listeners guess how many pennies will fit in that pothole until it’s filled. It’s great social engagement for a week, then go do it, with a video you can release once done. Maybe get the mayor on, too, to get the pothole filled properly when you’re done.