DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

October, 1997: October usually is a busy month for me, and this one was true to form.

My first trip of the month was to Stevens Point, Wisconsin, where I conducted a full-day programming seminar (How To Critique Air Talent, The Great PD Challenge, Radical Station Imaging) for the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association. This was the third year in a row the WBA brought to me Wisconsin for such an event.

The seminars went quite well, but the trip itself produced two small inconveniences:

1. I lost my luggage cart at the airport in Wisconsin.

When I arrived, it was raining, and I recall struggling to maneuver all of my stuff to the car rental shuttle bus. Somehow I managed to leave my trusty cart behind.

Yes, I did check with the airport’s Lost & Found prior to returning to Los Angeles. Yes, they did have a luggage cart that someone had lost. No, it wasn’t mine.

2. During this trip, I had been reading IN EVIL HOUR by Gabriel García Márquez. Márquez is a spell-binding yet demanding author; he requires the reader’s full concentration. (His 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE wins my vote for World’s Greatest Novel.)

As I settled into my airline seat for the flight to Chicago (which would connect to a second flight to L.A.), I was proud to have completed the first half of the book.

I was on Page 122. Turning the page, I was confused by the next sentence. I turned back to re-read the last paragraph, then returned to the new page.

Still it made no sense.

Had I accidentally skipped a page? No.

But it turned out the book I had so carefully selected as my travelling companion had been misprinted: It skipped from Page 122 to Page 155.

With Márquez, you can get lost if you overlook a single sentence. A 33-page gap? Forget it. Sadly, I put down the book and picked up the somewhat less compelling in-flight magazine.

A trade publication writer visited my website.

Apparently she found a lot of the site’s approach to be humorous, because she called me and asked, “Do you think humor is the great communicator?”

As a radio personality, I did a comedy-oriented show.

For 15 years, I wrote & published two comedy services for radio people.

I’ve written & produced a couple of comedy records.

And I’m here to tell you: Humor is not the great communicator.

The two most important attributes of a successful communicator are:

1.  Having a message you want to communicate.

2.  Having a sincere desire to communicate that message.

Some people become public speakers, for example, because they think, “Hey, it would be fun to get paid to speak!” And then they flounder around for a topic to offer to the marketplace.

The best public speakers, however, begin with a message.

Herb Cohen, author of YOU CAN NEGOTIATE ANYTHING, speaks on one topic: Negotiating.

That’s his specialty. His passion.

He could read a few books on “Team-Building” or “Creativity” and add those topics to his repertoire. But those aren’t the topics he’s passionate about communicating.

Once you know what your message is, use whatever communicative style works best for you — the one that fits your own personality.

If I’m creating a new seminar, I begin by listing all the points I want to cover. The longer the list, the better.

(When I was a jock, I began with a list of all the notes I’d made since my previous airshift.)

As that trade publication writer noticed, my own style often includes a humorous approach to presenting “serious” information. As I try to arrange that list into some logical progression, frequently a number of humorous approaches to the material occurs to me.

If I think of a “funny” way to get my point across, I might incorporate it into my presentation.

But here’s the trick: I don’t look for humorous illustrations. I discover them as I try to whip the material into shape.

What’s your own personal style?

Humorous?

Deadpan?

Ultra-Serious?

Angry?

Timid?

Confrontational?

Once you know what style is most natural and most effective for you, you don’t need to “try.” Instead, every attempt to communicate is an act of discovery.

And that absolutely includes attempts to communicate via the airwaves.

Here’s a very expensive television commercial, very “creative,” interesting to look at.

Undoubtedly it will win some awards, which is good for the ad agency that produced it because that will attract more business to that agency.

Only one problem….

“If machines can’t eat it, machines shouldn’t make it.”

Why not?

Is that really a criterion by which you decide whether to eat a chicken sandwich — whether it was breaded by a machine or by a human hand?

They could just as well say, “If machines can’t drive it, machines shouldn’t make it.”

Or, “If machines can’t drink it, machines shouldn’t make it.”

The entire focus of this attention getting, visually interesting campaign is completely unrelated to any real reason that someone should choose a Carl’s Jr. chicken fillet sandwich over that of any competitor.

Yeah, it’ll win awards. Ad agencies fall all over themselves praising their own work for being “creative.”

But it’s very unlikely that seeing the sandwich smash into the robot’s mouth made you want to eat a Carl’s Jr. chicken fillet sandwich.

In addition to being a source of entertainment or information or companionship, a radio station is a community.

If lots of people want to be identified as members of your community, that’s a good thing for your station.

Not everyone who ever listens to your radio station, however, feels like a member of your community.

Even being a regular, faithful listener isn’t necessarily enough to make someone a member of your community.

In personality testing — for example, the long-established MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) — researchers long have been aware of the danger of a test taker’s results being skewed by the individual’s desire not to “look bad” to…well, to the computer that scores the results.

For example, one of the “yes/no” questions is, “At times I feel like smashing things.”

Perhaps that’s true for the person taking the test, but that person doesn’t want to be seen as having violent tendencies. So the test subject deliberately misreports his feelings, urges or behaviors.

That testing trap is called “Social Desirability.” That person doesn’t want to be identified with the group of people labelled “violent tendencies,” so he disavows any association with “those people.”

So what?

Originally I planned to play a radio commercial for you to point out that, if I guess correctly, violates Federal Trade Commission regulations.

My “guess” — and I’m willing to back it up with a large wager — is that “Jane” isn’t real. It’s someone who is being paid to read a commercial script, not someone who lost 25 pounds in four weeks as a result of patronizing the “medical spa.”

If I’m right, then Millennium Medical Spa had better hope their advertising doesn’t come to the attention of the FTC.

If Jane is a real patient success story, then it’s simply a poor commercial. Making reality sound fake really isn’t a smart strategy.

But as the radio commercial came to an end, another began. And my jaw dropped.

Give it a listen. How many people do you know who gladly would want to be identified as a member of this music radio station’s apparent community?

If that’s the image of that radio station’s community, it’s possible that “Social Desirability” will discourage some people to “forget” that they listen to that station.

That wouldn’t do much for the station’s word of mouth.

And if the station is in a rated market that relies on self-report rather than on Portable People Meters, it wouldn’t help the radio station’s ratings, etc.

(Lest anyone misunderstand: I’m not suggesting those advertisers should be banned from the station. But playing them back-to-back cheats those two advertisers and damages the radio station.)