DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

When I was a kid, supermarkets gave out “green stamps.”

People would paste the green stamps into little booklets.

The green stamps companies (the one that comes to mind is “S & H”) published catalogues featuring all the goodies you could get by redeeming the appropriate number of completed stamp books.

I remember asking my mother if we could “go to the redemption place.”

She replied, “Sounds like a church.”

Whenever I see a sign that says “Validation,” I think of that incident. And I make a little mental joke about its possible alternate meaning…

…A thought that obviously also occurred to this clever filmmaker.

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.