It’s all too easy when you write as many tips as I do to dwell on seeming negatives or weaknesses. But that’s not the purpose of coaching. Yes, you want to shore up a weak foundation. But after that, the main job is to find what a talent does best and push those qualities into the spotlight.

Then there’s getting consistent – really consistent, where it’s impossible to have a bad day.

And the final level is “How high can we fly?” It’s all about what you can keep coming up with that’s fresh and new, and sets you apart from everyone else in a way that’s almost like waiting for the next new album your favorite band will come up with.

Here’s what great radio does. It gives you what you expect, but with surprises built in. It’s consistent, but not predictable. In every market, there are a couple of stations that get this, and they rule the roost. A bad book can’t bring them down, their Promotions never fail, and the listener always has a sense of “I wonder what they’ll do next?”

That can be your station. If you don’t have one, get a great Consultant; not just someone off a list, but someone who’s helped other stations that you admire reach a very high level of performance. If you have the money, hire a Talent Coach. It’s easy to think you don’t really need one, but name a major league baseball team without a batting coach. (Or ask Tom Brady or Peyton Manning about their quarterback coaches.) With a good coach – not someone who controls your job, but a real coach – you’ll find that the process is so dear and so revealing that you don’t want to go it alone.

Then work every single time the mic opens to welcome in the person who’s just hearing you for the first time, and to sound natural, like a friend talking to a friend, instead of making ‘announcements’ and ‘presentations’. THAT’S what great radio does right.

I hear a lot of pandering to the audience lately.

Here are a couple of examples:

“Here’s the forecast for your Tuesday…” (It’s not “my” Tuesday. It doesn’t belong to anyone. Remember, the Weather app on my iPhone can give me the weather, and has a map of what’s going on right above my house.)

This one came from a morning show – a bumper that said “Call your show now…” (It’s not MY show. And if it were, I’d want that sidekick fired that still thinks “That’s what SHE said” is funny.)

There are lots of others, each more tedious than the next. There’s a word for this. It’s obsequious. It means “fawning” – slathering someone with phony-baloney praise. (Street meaning: kissing butt.)

Just be real. No one believes this horse hockey. Take it off your station now.

If you want to have a conversation with an adult, treat ’em like an adult.

If you want to have a conversation with a teenager, treat ’em like an adult.

Ah, another morning of listening to a team show. Waiting for the ‘biggie’ – a break in their biggest hour, when they have the most cume. Here it comes. Will it be the two of them weighing in on something everybody is talking about today? Will it be something really inventive, that only they would do?

The song ends, I turn up the volume, and hear… “Things that are supposed to be bad for you, but really aren’t.”

“Filler” material, total B-grade stuff. At best, just mildly interesting. Certainly not compelling. It wasn’t top of mind, it didn’t say anything unique about the show or the station, and there was no local tie-in.

So why do it?

When you “shop” for Content, stay in the meat section, not the tofu aisle. As a listener, if I don’t care about what you’re talking about, it’s easy for me to just not listen.

The less generic you get, the more definable you get. There’s a huge difference between asking someone to go see a spy movie, or asking them to go see a James Bond movie. I don’t care about a nameless, faceless spy, but if it’s a new Bond movie, let’s go early so I can get a hot dog and some popcorn.

In the continuing battle to get more “right brain” elements into radio stations, I recently had a client station that was still playing “bumpers” – those things that would end a break by the morning team with a bumper (what some people call a “punctuator”) like “Shaker and Blotto…on 102.5 The Rock” into the commercial stopsets.

Bumpers were a bad idea when they first came on the scene a couple of decades ago, and one of the main uses for them was in syndicated shows. The thinking was that you had to remind the listener (who apparently must be an idiot to most programmers) what the name of the show was, and/or what the name of the station was. But in the real world – the listener’s world – he hears the show’s name or the station’s name, then a commercial. So guess what image is carried forward? You = commercials.

Plus, the bumper destroys the First Exit, the most powerful radio technique I’ve ever come up with, by literally stopping the momentum instead of moving forward seamlessly and having the spotbreak on you almost before you’re even aware of it. (If you’re unfamiliar with The First Exit, please see Tip #3 on my blog site.)

It’s easier to see how nonsensical this is if you visualize a real-life conversation. If we’re sitting over lunch talking and I make a good point, I don’t have an announcer come over to the table and say “Tommy Kramer!” after it. That would be very weird.

This is just another one of those old radio things that sounds Strategic in the planning stage, but is actually an incomplete thought. If you’re good, identify yourself regularly when it’s appropriate to do so, and have true Momentum, people will learn and remember who you are and where they heard it. Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory don’t use bumpers into commercials, so why should we?

Momentum trumps everything else. Period. Bumpers are an impediment to momentum. No amount of so-called “branding” can overcome that. While radio people see promos, bumpers, and commercials as different things, in the listener’s world, there are just two elements – Music, and things that aren’t music. To the listener, the bumper is just a commercial for you.

Oh, and let’s do away with the little movie and TV “drops”, too. They were great 20 years ago, but they’re not new anymore. I say just get into the spotbreak, and make everyone else sound like they have to quack their names out before they can move forward.

Here’s something that should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. Work from the Listener back, not from the Control Room forward.

Example: Once, a morning team that I work with in Houston wanted to talk about American Idol auditions being held there the next day. Although they did a pretty good job of delivering the information, using the music from the show as staging, they missed the opportunity to get inside the Listener’s life and make it more visual by describing the scene in her house. (That station’s target Listener is a 28-year old female named “Jennifer,” with a husband, “Mike,” and a baby girl – two years old.)

Here’s the real deal:

It’s just before 6:00 in “Jennifer’s” house on the night before the auditions, and she’s telling her little girl and her husband that if they want dinner, they can either cook something themselves, or go get some takeout food. But they can FORGET seeing her there, because she’s going to the auditions, and if it means standing under a bridge in the rain for 12 hours, that was just tough…because that’s exactly what she’s going to do!

Describing that scene on the air, with its animation and sense of urgency, would be much more compelling than just giving the information.

Most Air Talents make the mistake of deciding what they want to do, and then projecting it toward the Listener. But it’s easy to just sound clinical or informational, and lose the opportunity to convey the visual “flavor” of that “scene” in the Listener’s life. In reality, what ALWAYS works is starting from the Listener’s perspective and working back to the Control Room, then putting that on the air.

You can never go wrong by reflecting your Listener’s life back to her (or him). It gives you a much better chance of ‘linking up’ in a right-brain way.

This is the simplest way to guarantee success with any Content you do: Prep the ending first.

Here’s why:

Suppose you have several errands to run. You need to drop some clothes off at the dry cleaners, you’ve got to mail something, and you need to go to the grocery store. So to save gas and go in more of a straight line, you plan everything so you go to the grocery store last. If you don’t, you’re going to end up with a lot of refrigerated items melting in the back seat while you’re doing the other errands.

It’s the same way with everything on the air – know where you’re GOING. Where the “destination” is. THEN, plan the beginning – how you’ll get into whatever the subject is. You’ll find that the middle pretty much takes care of itself.

Saturday Night Live is a good example. Through the years, they’ve always had talented people in the cast, but when the show was strongest, every ‘bit’ had a sense of purpose – an ending or conclusion that was solid and provided some sort of resolution at the end. When the show was at its weakest, there were still some good ideas, but they just kind of fizzled out at the end.

As you’ve heard or seen me state before, Momentum and Pace are different things. Pace is how fast you go, but Momentum is how straight a line there is between Point A and Point B.

You don’t necessarily gain Momentum by just going faster. It takes being concise, and good construction, like a great writer’s book that you can’t put down.

Recently, this came up in a dramatic way as a Talk show I work with really got it, and moved effortlessly forward by keeping a close eye on the lengths of calls.

Continue reading →

The great movie Director Alfred Hitchcock was once asked by a reporter, “Is it true that you said all actors are cattle?”
Hitchcock replied, “No, I did not say that all actors are cattle. I said that all actors should be treated as cattle.”

Whenever you have a guest – or a guest host – keep that in mind. If the guest or guest host is from TV, chances are that they know NOTHING about radio. They know about hair product and how to read a teleprompter, but if they knew anything about keeping a viewer around, they wouldn’t keep saying things like “after this break” or “when we return.” (I’ll dive further into this in a future tip.)  A guest, like someone who’s on “The Biggest Loser” or whatever, knows even less. They’re pretty much like ducklings, just trying to smile and not sound like amateurs.

YOU have to organize things for them.

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The National Football League is a “copycat” league. If a team succeeds by throwing 50 passes a game, the next year, every team looks for its Peyton Manning or Tom Brady.

If a mobile quarterback wins a bunch of games, everyone starts drafting a quarterback who can run in addition to pass. (I’m not talking about Tim Tebow. Note the “and PASS” part. The only target Tebow can hit consistently is the ground.)

Radio’s like that, too. Continue reading →

Thanks to my friend Randy Brown for this thought:

Often, when you select a YouTube clip, it starts with a commercial. In many instances, a message pops up in the lower right portion of the screen that says “You can skip to video in…” and then it counts down 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1, then you click it to get to what you actually wanted to see in the first place.

That’s the way people think when they listen to you. You start talking, and in the listener’s head, the 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 countdown begins.

Get on into it, or the listener “clicks” mentally – or sometimes even physically – and isn’t hearing you anymore. It’s just “blah-blah-blah” noise in the background. So you want to connect the Subject to the Listener as concisely as you can.

We have to EARN EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF LISTENING that we get. You do not deserve being listened to just because your transmitter is on.