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 readingRadio personalities tend to think only of what works in the Control Room, not necessarily what works better on the OTHER side of the radio – you know, the Listener’s side.
My brilliant friend John Frost and I had a challenge once in Orlando. Together, we ran five stations, one of which was a rather dormant AM station that we wanted to resurrect as a Sports Talk station.
But we didn’t have a budget to make a splash and get people to sample this new baby that was one of the very first Sports Talk stations in that day to really open up the so-called rules. We wanted big personalities, parody commercials, a station Imaging voice (Jeff Lawrence) who was crazy inventive. But that was all just on the air. How to get noticed was the challenge.
So… Continue reading
Have you ever wondered why health clubs, weight loss products, or stop smoking schemes seem to advertise most at the beginning of a new year?
Folks in white lab coats say there is a psychological reason for it. (Perhaps you’d like to take notes)
Continue reading“When we enter a new time period our relationship with our past self is weakened and it becomes a little bit easier to change our behaviour … If you want to disrupt a habit , target your messaging to the start of new time periods.”
Richard Shotton, “The Illusion of Choice”
In the last tip, I said, “Your show really is a movie without the camera.”
After you get past learning “the basics,” then develop a real Personality on the air, you’ll hopefully reach a stage in your career where the ego disappears and you actually just get in a zone where it’s almost impossible to have a bad show.
But I believe it requires getting outside of radio, mentally, and seeing each “Content” break you do as a little movie (without the camera).
What do I, as a listener, FEEL when you talk about something? Continue reading
