A local radio station is attempting to inject personality into a rather stale, music-intensive format by having its jocks deliver topical one-liners over song intros.
The jokes themselves are pretty good: timely and quick.
But there two things severely limit the effectiveness of this tactic.
1. Except for the occasional one-liner — apparently delivered according to a predetermined schedule — the jocks never say anything else aside from the basics.
So a typical hour consists of 59 minutes, 40 seconds of no personality plus 20 seconds of humorous comment. The effect is jarring.
2. Possibly because they are required to deliver the line only within the time frame of the song intro, the jocks aren’t identified within the breaks where they do the jokes.
So one song ends, the listener hears a recorded liner or jingle, another song begins, and then an anonymous, disembodied voice makes a humorous comment about something in the day’s news.
Well, who is making that observation?
Comedy without context can be only slightly amusing, at best. And definitely not memorable.
Result? Instead of delivering a “Ha!” experience to the listener, the radio station delivers a “Huh?” experience.
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A darn shame, this is what some radio has become. skeleton walks into a bar orders a beer and a mop. prolly some get hired for minimum wage to voice track the radio station. what the businesses has forgotten is it takes personality people listen to the radio include myself want that 1 to 1 interaction. why should I pay someone with experience when I can hire kid off the street to do it for next to nothing. all I can say to corporate radio if you don’t always get what you pay 4.Like back when I bought stock in your company at 11-12 dollars a share which is no work next to nothing
Radio should, I think, engage listeners in a conversation. I imagine speaking to someone, and in my mind hearing their reaction. If something funny, a laugh. Sad, an “aww…” A ‘horrible’ pun, I imagine a groan. And it’s always in a context that I set up to deliver the punch line.
Sounds like automation combined with a network distribution system trying to sound local, immediate, and spontaneous. Computer assembled radio trying to pass itself off as real without anyone noticing? Guess what…we noticed.
You know radio is in bad shape when people who spell probably as ‘prolly’ and refuse to capitalize words think radio is in trouble.