Don’t worry! I’m not going to ask how many times you play “Easter Parade” by Judy Garland and Fred Astaire.
Easter, from a programming perspective, is not like Christmas with 27 different versions of “Mary, Did You Know?” that we can play.
But the principle is the same.
Continue readingYears ago at a radio gathering in Nashville, a dear friend and outstanding morning show talent and I did a Content seminar.
My friend had himself drifted a bit himself, doing old creaky bits like “This Day in History” and “Stupid Criminal Stories.”
…until I started coaching him.
It’s hard to understand why an air talent thinks that reading social media posts on the air can somehow be inherently interesting in itself.
Sure, some postings are good, cool, funny, sweet. And we can certainly use those. But we all know that most “normal” people – who aren’t trained in how to communicate or entertain – are pretty boring. Bless their hearts, they use too many words and include insignificant details. The first sentence we hear can make you not want to hear the second one.
A brown-eyed five-year-old looked in my eyes and said, “I don’t want to be alone.”
This wasn’t in response to being left in aisle 7 at Costco for less than ten seconds. This wasn’t a response to some other recent event in his life. This was a reaction to the human condition: we don’t want to be alone.
The people in the white coats have a name for it. It’s called “monophobia.”
Continue readingAt the start of his career, *Steve Martin’s standup routine included a “Ramblin’ Guy” parody folk song that started well and then just kind of drifted off into the ozone layer for a while.
Sadly, we’ve all heard this (or done it ourselves), but it wasn’t funny. It was just someone starting something, then losing the center of it, then trying to steer it back onto the road, but adding too many words, using too many examples – all things I’ve written about in recent tips.
My dear friend Beau Weaver, Voice Actor extraordinaire, recently expressed some interesting thoughts about today’s radio.
One of the things he said was that most young people he talks to think of a deejay as that person who mixes music at a club. Younger demos don’t care much about radio; they care more about podcasts and YouTube influencers. Radio, as usual, gets little respect.
Remember chemistry class? Memorizing the table of elements. Learning about atoms.
A peek through the microscope at the periodic table of your radio station would reveal only two elements. MUSIC and WORDS.
Continue readingYour station’s Imaging is on 24/7/365. More, by FAR, than any individual air talent is on.
It sends out your message to the listener; how you want to be thought of. Or as everyone says today, “Your Brand.” (Ick. What a stupid label.)
So, let me help you with two related thoughts:
Right at the end of 2023, an amazing thing happened. The great movie director Peter Jackson got with Giles Martin, son of the Beatles’ producer George Martin, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, and using ‘computer learning,’ salvaged a John Lennon demo of a song called “Now and Then.”
It became a massive hit (#1 in England, 54 years after their last #1, and the same type of reception all over the world). And the video Jackson created was remarkable.
Our format can be either…
…a bunch of songs that people don’t know by artists they’ve never heard of…
or…
… stories and songs about the most important things in our lives.
The former results in a station with a one share. The latter results in a station that has the potential to be a market leader.
Continue reading
