Dan Ingram died a few days ago.  If you’re not familiar with him, suffice it to say that to a ton of people, he was the Michael Jordan of radio.  Primarily known for his work in New York on WABC and WCBS, maybe this Wikipedia quote says it best:

Ingram was one of the most highly regarded DJs from his era.  He was noted for his quick wit and ability to convey a humorous or satiric idea with quick pacing and an economy of words, a skill which rendered him uniquely suited to, and successful within, modern personality-driven music radio.

Yes, the style was a little different then, but he was FUN, and you never knew what he’d say next.  So with Dan Ingram in mind…

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A lot of air talents are not even aware of talent coaching.  They have aircheck sessions with the PD – maybe – and that’s about it.  I don’t know every talent coach working these days, but most of the ones I do know concentrate on Content – the search for it, the storytelling skill set, how to dig inside yourself and reveal things that (hopefully) the listener can identify with.

And that’s fine.  That’s the “big picture stuff,” and it matters.  If you’re fortunate enough to work with a Valerie Geller or Randy Lane, for instance, there’s no doubt that you will get better, and understand a lot of things you probably never “got” before.

But there’s something else that plays a huge factor in being the Full Package, and that’s simply being a good disc jockey.

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With all the conversations going on in radio circles about the uses of social media, there’s a giant, Grand Canyon-sized difference being overlooked.  Let’s just use Facebook as the best example, simply because it’s the most-utilized social media platform.

As of this writing, there are about 225 million people in the United States using Facebook.

But there are over 323 million people in this country, and well over 90% of them listen to radio for a significant amount of time every single day.  So radio has somewhere between sixty-five to ninety million more people using it every single day than Facebook does.

I’ve talked a lot about how random postings on Facebook don’t make for compelling radio Content; quite the opposite, usually.  And this is why: because they’re used in totally different ways.

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No matter how many songs in a row you play or “commercial-free zones” your station may promote, radio is still at its core about the CONNECTION between you and the Listener.

A great Consultant can help you map out a Strategy, but the essence of Coaching is about how many ways there are to carry out that strategy.  And when it comes to engaging the listener, and making that person want to listen longer or more often, sometimes the little things matter more than the big things.

Here’s an example, from morning team Tom & Ana on Contemporary Christian station Spirit 105.3 in Seattle:

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“The Best Variety at Work…”
“(City)’s Best Music…”
“We Play More Music…”
“The Home of the Fifty-Minute Music Hour…”

We’ve all heard these.

None of them – not one – is true.

So why are you using them?

In a world surrounded by B. S., why are you adding to the junk pile of words thrown together like they fell out of a bowl of Alpha Bits and made what sounds like a sentence?

What do any of these say about the Values of your radio station?  Or your city?  Or anything, really, that’s meaningful to your audience?

Let’s take a close look…

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“He’s got such a great voice.”

We used to hear that a lot, but today, it’s virtually meaningless.  In L.A. and New York, the big voices are doing tractor pull spots and horror movie spots, and you still hear the network TV guys doing that big, mighty “announcement” thing some, but be honest – doesn’t it just sound kind of cheesy?

The voice that gets the most work today is the midrange voice with great inflection.  But even then, it’s not the old-school radio “emphatic” read; it’s more, as the great voice acting coach Marice Tobias says, “noticing” a word.

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One word can change everything. If you’re going to be a truly good Talent, you have to actually think about the words that are coming out of your mouth. I work with people all the time on this.

For example, I heard this the other day:
“I want to hear from you RIGHT NOW. Can you think of a song that’s got something about automobiles in it?”

No. And even if I could, why should I call you? What’s in it for me?

You can’t treat listeners like employees. They’re not here to do your bidding. You’re here to do theirs, actually.

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I’ve written about this before, but recent listening to stations in three different formats, it begs being revisited.

Here’s the magic key to becoming someone out of the ordinary on the air:  Avoid the Obvious.

Example:  Years ago, doing a morning team show in Dallas with my wonderful partner Rick “The Beamer” Robertson, there was a massive wreck on I-35, one of the city’s main arteries.  It turned out that a huge truck full of books was involved, and we knew we needed to talk about it.  Immediately upon seeing the story, Rick said “set it up, then throw it to me.”

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Talking to a PD the other day about “the clock” on his station, I heard this vague explanation of how he didn’t want his jocks to talk over song intros because that’s not Content.  Instead, he wanted Imaging pieces – some of them “dry” voice – to always play between songs because “you can’t do Content over these short intros today” and he wanted his air talent to stop down for Content.

But here’s the problem with that: to a large degree, Content is CONTACT.

In the heyday of Top 40 and Hot A/C, we knew that most of the time we could do SOMETHING besides just intro a song (like promote a contest opportunity coming up, or a station feature, promote another person on the air, give some sort of information, or do a quick quip), or that even if we WERE “just” introing a song, we could at least give the listener some sort of vibe about being engaged with the music.

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Maybe you haven’t thought about this in a while, but in moving back from five and a half years in Hawaii to my home town of Shreveport, Louisiana, I’m resetting the stations on my car radio.  As a result, I’ve been listening to a lot of different stations recently.  And I’m hearing a lot of things on music stations that I thought had been killed off a long time ago…

The “first in, last out” (FILO) thing where every break mandatorily starts with the name of the station, then also ends with the name of the station.  (This was always ridiculous.  Why do you want to sound like you somehow forgot that you said your name a few seconds ago?  And why would you EVER put the name of your station right next to a commercial break?  Think about it:  You = commercials is not a good impression to lock into the listener’s brain.)

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