Frost Advisory

Frost Advisory #326 – The Love of Learning

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This was Carlos’ first Momentum.  Our 30-minute coaching session began with, “I will do anything to learn and get better.”  Carlos is my new friend.

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”
~Henry Ford

Contrast Carlos’ attitude to the program director that doesn’t show up for the coaching sessions with his air staff and consultant.  Or the morning show deejay that is only willing to repeat bits from his previous station rather than learn what is meaningful in a new format.  Or the boss who keeps stressing he has 20 years of experience, making it all the more obvious to his team that it’s really only one year of experience 20 times.

What did you learn at #cmbmomentum16?

crayon-heart

“Give us content, stories, or any reason to tell all of our friends and the entire world about you.”
~Erin Branham

“When you change everything IN you it will change everything AROUND you.  Your attitude makes all the difference.”
~Clay Scroggins

“Come up with more different ways for them to love you.”
~Paul Jacobs

Here’s an idea!  Take three things you learned at Momentum and implement them right away at your radio station.  That, more than any memo you write or speech you give, will demonstrate that you love learning.

“When do you think most people stop learning?

Is it when we already know how to do something?

Is it when we have some success under our belts?

Is it when we imagine there’s nothing left to learn, no one knows something we don’t, or when we come to believe we know it all?

Whenever it is, it’s too soon, and it’s too bad, because we’ve always got a lot to learn… no matter how much we already know.”
~Mark Beeson

Tommy Kramer Tip

Tommy Kramer Tip #170 – Learn From Mike Nichols, Part 1

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Mike Nichols was one of the most talented people ever.  Grammy Award-winning improv comedian with his partner, Elaine May.  NINE-time Tony winner for directing on Broadway, Academy Award winning Director (The Graduate), and on and on.

One of the plays Nichols directed was Neil Simon’s most brilliant work, “The Odd Couple”.  If you know the play (or the movie), you know that some of the funniest scenes are Oscar Madison’s poker nights, with great character actors playing each part.  But in rehearsal, it wasn’t working.  So Nichols huddled up with the actors and told them, “Lines delivered as ‘punch lines’ don’t work.  It has to sound ACCIDENTAL to work.”

In radio, it’s the same, even when it’s not about being funny.  In something as simple as bringing up a subject, just one sentence – even just one phrase – can make the difference between sounding like you’re just sharing something, as opposed to “presenting” or “announcing” it.  (Or even worse, just reading something.  Eww.)

If you haven’t mastered this “accidental” sound yet (and about 90% of air talents haven’t), get some help.  We’ve all heard enough “heeeerrre comes a punch line!” people on the air.

Radio’s still a great way to make a living, and there’s no time limit.  You can do it ’til you drop dead at the microphone – IF you know what you’re doing.

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Frost Advisory

Frost Advisory #325 – The Smartest Person in the Room

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A special for Momentum 2016 “Hello Future” #cmbmomentum16

I once accepted an award for being the smartest boy in my high school.  It was one of my finer moments.

Don’t misunderstand.  I didn’t really win the award.  I simply walked up on the stage and accepted it before they had the chance to announce the real winner much to the amusement of my giggle-at-anything classmates.

This week in Orlando our little industry will gather at Disney Really Nifty Resort to learn what we can from really smart guys and gals.  “Learn what we can” is the catch phrase, literally.

What is most familiar is most believable, and the stuff we haven’t yet learned is inevitably unfamiliar.  That tends to make us skeptics.

“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”
~John Wooden

Confirmation bias is “the tendency to develop a quick belief about a situation and then seek out information that bolsters our beliefs.” Chip and Dan Heath “Decisive. How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work”

In other words, we tend to believe what we already believe.  Today’s political campaigning is dependent on it.

confirmation-bias

Consequently we’re skeptical of people that aren’t like us and tell that us things we’ve never heard before.

This week at Momentum, Michelle Younkman and her team have assembled several smart people that probably aren’t like us and will share things we’ve never heard before.  There’s a chance that we could learn a lot from them.

But we’ll have to admit we don’t know it all.

“…you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.”
~Barbara Kingsolver

Tommy Kramer Tip

Tommy Kramer Tip #169 – Listen to Yourself

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In this age of voice-tracking and syndication, I often come across people who never listen to themselves on the air.

In the old days, we had cassettes, usually one for each day of the week.  And I’d take the cassette, and play it in the car as I drove home or ran errands, just listening to the show.  Not to see how “wonderful” I was (I don’t think there was ever a show that seemed perfect to me), but to have an accurate feel for how I – or we, in my team show days – came across on the air, and to pick up on little “crutch” habits or words I used too much.  Maybe I laughed too often as a sort of reflex, for instance.  After HEARING it, I could start working immediately on CORRECTING it.

Okay, cassette days are gone.  But they’ve been replaced with truly incredible technology.  We have computer audio files that we can access remotely, we have devices for our phones or computers to record the show, and there’s simply no excuse anymore for not really knowing how you sound on the air.

If you want to get better, listen to yourself.  At least once a week. PDs often don’t have time to do aircheck sessions much anymore.  And if your station doesn’t use a Talent Coach, you can get into some nasty habits pretty easily.  (One woman I worked with laughed like a water buffalo being electrocuted.  But she was totally unaware of it.  Had she EVER bothered to listen to her OWN SHOW, she’d have realized it herself, instead of having to have me tell her about it.  Boy, was that session not fun.)

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Mason Morning Minute

How They Listen

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“In the end, I don’t care how customers listen SiriusXM. I only care if they listen. And so they want to listen on their phone, they want to listen through their Sonos device. They want to listen on their car radio through satellite delivered. They want to listen through their car radio through plug-in their phone and/or using Bluetooth with their phone, does not matter to me. What matters to me is that they listen and that they pay.”
~James E. Meyer, CEO, Sirius/XM

content-creation-ideas-inspiration

Why is it we confuse content creation with content distribution?  People not listening to the radio as much as they used to?  That’s a content creation challenge.  People using devices that can’t access your content, that’s a distribution issue.

Most of us in radio don’t differentiate between content creation and content distribution.  Here’s the sticky side of that issue: once you start creating content specifically for one kind of distribution channel, your creativity suffers, and there’s less interest in what you’re distributing.

Here’s a theory – always concentrate on content creation first.  Compelling content will always find its way to a distribution channel.  Even if you have a plethora of distribution channels, if what you have on them is “ok” you’re going to fail.  The MacBook Air I’m writing this on has more ability to generate content for different distribution channels than existed 50 years ago.  I can create all of the “new media” choices of digital, audio, video and social.

Still, it’s the dreamer sitting in front of the computer, not Steve Jobs’ invention, that creates the compelling content.  As I mentioned recently, we’re too busy tactically to take the time to dream, which is what creates the compelling content.  Without that dreamer, the distribution doesn’t matter.

Frost Advisory

Frost Advisory #324 – Never Point the Camera at Yourself

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“We (heart) logistics”, sing the actors dressed in the brown of the parcel delivery company, assuming that the internal work flow is meaningful to the customer.

“Bad advertising is like home movies.  In your ads, please, never point the camera at yourself.”
~Roy Williams, “The Wizard of Ads”

“Try church again,” declares one billboard campaign in Orlando, apparently targeting those least interested.   Even worse perhaps is the billboard artwork for hernia surgery.   (I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP, as Dave Barry would say.)

When you communicate the benefits of listening to your station, are you doing it from the perspective of those inside the station or those outside?  Careful.   This is trickier than it seems, because you’re on the inside.

My favorite bad radio campaign is “Not what you think!”, based on the assumptions that you, 1) already think something about that station, and that 2) it’s wrong!

Taylor makes wonderful guitars.  I even have a couple of them.  But their social media campaign isn’t focused on design and distribution, the things meaningful to those inside the factory.  No, they share stories of people enjoying their Taylor guitars.

“Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.  It is as if they are showing you the way.”
~Donald Miller, “Blue Like Jazz”

taylor-guitar

Tommy Kramer Tip

Tommy Kramer Tip #169 – Being yourself…unless…

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We hear it all the time.  “Be yourself on the air.”

Being yourself IS what you want to be, UNLESS your natural “self” is too exuberant for the intimacy of radio.

Loud talkers, for instance.  Those jocks that seem to SHOUT everything.  Over the course of coaching somewhere around 1700 people, I’ve dealt with a lot of these foghorn types, usually old Top 40 jocks who make “announcements” or “present” things.  And they always say the same thing when I point this out:  “But that’s just the way I talk.”  (Actually, they say “BUT THAT’S JUST THE WAY I TALK.”)

Well if that’s true, you’ll need to change.

To become a great talent, you need to fully understand, master, and be able to control your “instrument” – your voice.

When you SHOUT at me on the air, you’re forgetting that I can hit a button and turn you OFF.  And believe me, I will.

If you need to get loud to express excitement or outrage, back off the mic a few inches, even turn your head away from it.  That way, I still get the Emotion, but I also still have functioning eardrums.

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Mason Morning Minute

The Future Comes To Those Who Make It

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“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
~Abraham Lincoln

When you’re walking along the beach, early in the morning, everything past the waves on the beach is invisible.  You know there’s an ocean out there, but due to the fog bank, you can’t see it.  Just like you know there’s a future out there, but you can’t see it.

This is where so many visions fail.  The people involved can’t see past the fog bank, so they avoid anything about the future, missing the people on the small fishing boat and the ocean liner carrying passengers to far away places.  There’s a critical shortage of the Christopher Columbuses, John Glenns and Elon Musks who saw a future and made it happen.

Some of this is a simple vision block, we tell ourselves we don’t have a vision and so concentrate on the tactics that wind up taking us nowhere.  But some of it is also because we’re so tactically oriented that we don’t take the time to dream.  We think we have to be in a state of constant busyness – and you know what they say about a body in motion staying in motion.

Finally, there are those who think that planning gets in the way of a grander scheme to which we’re only a part of.  There’s an almost Biblical ban on strategy because it could get in God’s way.  I could be wrong, but I subscribe to what a famous dreamer, Galileo once said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, intellect and reason intended for us to forgo their use.”

The perfect way to predict the future is to create it.  There’s a wonderfully simplistic, strategic sense to that, Abe.

 

 

Frost Advisory

Frost Advisory #323 – Where You’re From, and Why It Matters

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Sometimes we treat it like it’s a nuance.  It’s not.

We don’t have a choice.  Not really.

If we want to be effective communicators we have to speak their language.  See it through their eyes.  Understand their perspective.

I’ll prove it.

This is a really cool map that shows the richest person in every state.

richest-people-map

Now tell me, where did your eyes naturally go when you looked at this map?

Likely to where you’re from.

“To move and audience, especially a diverse audience, from where they are to where you want them to be requires common ground.  If you want me to follow you on a journey, you have to come get me.  The journey must begin where I am, not where you are or where you think I should be.

…If the journey begins with the assumption that everybody here know what we are doing, you will eventually have an audience of people who already know what you are doing.  If you journey begins with the assumption that everybody in the audience is a believer, then eventually your audience will be full of believers.  Who shows up for Third Day concerts?  Primarily people who know and are expecting Third Day music.  Where you consistently begin and what you consistently assume determine who consistently shows up.  Why?  Because your assumptions create the common ground for the journey.”
~Andy Stanley, “Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love To Attend“