The other day, I was having to teach someone how to talk over a song intro.  This is a modern phenomenon, apparently, because most people on the radio today never heard the Drake Format or the “Q” Format that revolutionized radio in the late sixties and early seventies.

Before those, jocks just talked whenever and wherever they wanted to, so you heard a song end, the jock blather for a few seconds (or longer), and then start another song, talking up to the vocal.

Bill Drake changed that.  Jocks fit the song intro, instead of starting early.  Momentum increased exponentially.  The Q stations (KCBQ in San Diego first, others later) took it another step further.  But jocks tended to lose contact with the pace of the song, doing every break in a high-powered delivery.

Stations like KNUS in Dallas, Y95 in Miami and others took it beyond that, maintaining the momentum, but also introducing a sensitivity to the pace and “vibe” of the song and matching it with the delivery.

Enough with the history lesson.  Jocks today grew up hearing a song end, the talent talking for much too long, then another song starting.  Momentum ceased to exist under the guise of “respecting the music,” primarily an Album Rock approach.

Stop – Start – Stop – Start.  The definition of NO true momentum.

So back to the recent session.  Continue reading →

Just last month, an associate sent me this email:

Do you have any suggestions for how to correct a “Ron Radio” delivery?  A client of mine in a small market sent their night jock’s audio to me.  He is kind of a puker.  It’s been forever since I’ve dealt with someone who pukes on the air.  I was going to have him put a picture of his wife (or similar) in front of him to maybe make him more conversational.  I remember you having a better way of having someone visualize speaking to another person.

My reply:

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Despite all the zillions of VERY specific tips that I coach, the people I’ve worked with the longest know that I’m all about developing Personality on the air.  The most important mentors in my career stressed that – particularly as “cookie cutter” formats became dominant – Personality was the sweet brown liquid inside the Coca-Cola can.

Just the other day, a guy I’ve worked with for several years took a foray into the world of creating a character voice to do his weather forecasts, and ran it several times during his show.  It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t ‘ready for prime time’ yet, either.  Here’s part of what I wrote in our session recap:

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In talking to Program Directors and GMs over the years, I’ve heard a lot of discussion about why a show does or doesn’t really get the audience the people in charge think it should.

For example, they’ll go down their bullet-point lists of all the ingredients that a morning show should have – the capsule descriptions of what words describe each Talent, which one is the “starter” and which is the “reactor,” and (hopefully) the reason people will listen to them.

But if you stop there, you’re missing the center of the bulls-eye: Values.

What are the talent’s values?  What are the station’s values?  What do you STAND for?

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The buzz word today is “stories.”  That’s a simplistic way of saying that personal experiences are more powerful and memorable than just “bits” or “items.”

And the best example I’ve ever seen of how stories should take shape is the TV show “Survivor.”

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At the end of the Fall 2017 network television season, we saw something unprecedented.  The reason you may not have noticed it is that it didn’t work – at all.

“The last episode before the gripping season finale…” was the “trailer” at the end of the NEXT TO LAST episode of at least two series that I regularly watch.

Think about this.  “The last episode before the last episode.”  Where does the madness end with these stupid network hype machines?

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I keep hearing things being READ to me in EXAGGERATED tones: “THANK you for ALL you’ve DONE!”

Thinking about how to help people mature and get past this point, I happened to have an old Andy Griffith Show on while I worked the other day.  It was an early episode, from the first season, and Andy himself was REALLY exaggerated, using a loud, cornpone delivery that made him sound like a cartoon character.

But Griffith himself said later in his life that he found it difficult to watch those episodes, when he was still basically just doing his country bumpkin character from “No Time For Sergeants,” his first Broadway play (and later, his first movie).  That was kind of the style then; everything was overplayed.  And Andy thought he needed to stay in ‘vocal overdrive’ to be the comedy center of the show.

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In the previous two tips, we went over Step 1 – weeding the garden of bad or outdated habits, and really seeing into what an actual Strategy is, rather than just a bunch of Tactics thrown at the wall to see what sticks – and Step 2, which is a crucial building block of developing both Timing and Trust, in what you do on the air and in shaping the knack of pulling people closer to you.

Those are huge, and take some time to believe in, because there are plenty of people who THINK they’re coaches that actually know nothing about starting from scratch and creating an entity that has a real chance to get huge ratings.

Step 3 of my coaching process is the most fun, the longest lasting, and the most imaginative:  It’s all about the Art – the “how high can you fly?” quest that all great talents have.

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Last week, in Step 1, I let you in on the first step of my coaching process – which is primarily a “weeding the garden” period of stripping away outdated habits, and learning how Strategy is different from Tactics.  (Tactics should grow out of the Strategy you’ve chosen for the station and for the show; not the other way around.)

The second step is where the real issues come to the surface:  Developing Timing and Trust.

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Recently, a station manager brought me aboard to work with a new air talent that had just come to the station.  Even though the new guy done a couple of sessions with me a year or two ago, he’s still afraid of being coached.  The boss told me the guy’s exact words were that “He doesn’t want someone coming along trying to make him sound like everyone else.”

Well, first of all, that’s not what I do.  Yes, I have some basic principles that have been proven to work over the course of coaching over 350 stations in all formats.  But a lot of times, a talent will harbor this fear of making changes simply because (1) he didn’t work with a good coach, (2) he thinks he knows all he needs to know, and/or (3) he associates the “bits” he does with BEING his identity.

So in case you’re approached with working with a talent coach (and there are only about three that deserve to be called that), I’m going to lay out my 3 Steps of Coaching over the course of the next few tips.

Step 1: Correcting bad habits, and “weeding the garden.”

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