There’s a financial talk show on a small AM radio station where I live that I occasionally listen to. It’s terrible radio, but the guys are smart, cough a lot, and give insightful advice. Besides, they’ve helped me make a gazillion imaginary dollars in the stock market.

The trouble is they don’t understand radio and way too much of the show is comprised with inside references (the office neck tie policy), dropped phone calls (“is the caller there? Hello? Please turn down your radio!”), actually reading articles out loud from the Wall Street Journal (BORING!), or making references to things they said thirty minutes ago (“Do I have to repeat this again?”).

Well, Friday – Good Friday – topped it all!

Because of the holiday Friday’s show was a repeat of Thursday’s show. So we were treated to invitations to call (which we couldn’t), the plugging of tomorrow’s repeat show (which was now today, so tomorrow’s wasn’t), and commentary on that day’s stock prices (now obsolete). In a world where stock exchanges can execute trades more than a million times faster than the human mind can make a decision, nothing is more irrelevant than day-old financial news . Let’s face it! The show was a rerun simply because they didn’t make the effort to be relevant.

While it’s easy to scoff at their lack of effort on this little AM station, I hear things on big FM stations that aren’t much better. In a world of choice, people choose. Relevancy drives those choices.

Maybe someone could invent a large traffic light for the studio that signaled STOP when we weren’t relevant to the listener, adding something of value between songs, or simply making the effort.
Perhaps that traffic light would signal what my pal Dean O’Neal, a seasoned traffic guy himself, often says, there is nothing less relevant than a traffic report for traffic you’re NOT in.

Nothing, that is, except yesterday’s show.