Here’s the beginning of a radio commercial running in Los Angeles.
It’s the kind of thing I might offer as a parody of a typically bad radio advertisement.
Can you write something even more meaningless, with more cliches, for those first 16 seconds?
Christine Coyle, longtime Creative Director of Dick Orkin’s Famous Radio Ranch, demonstrates how “text analysis” isn’t a boring, academic exercise; it’s a tool that helps voice actors nail their performances.
June, 1997 (continued): After a flight from Nuremberg, Germany, to Frankfurt and a missed flight to Oslo followed by one that put me 3 hours behind schedule, I arrived in Norway.
My visit to Norway was typically brief: Upon landing in Oslo, I took a four-minute taxi ride to my hotel, checked in, went to sleep, got up the next morning, and spent the day with the air staff of Radio 1.
Then it was back to the airport and on to Vienna (changing planes in what rapidly was becoming one of my less-than-favorite airports, Frankfurt).
With a 10:45PM arrival, I would be lucky to log anywhere near my required eight hours’ sleep.
At 11:45PM, a taxi deposited me in front of the Hotel Das Triest. As the cab drove away, a hotel employee hurried to meet me, exclaiming, “Mr. O’Day?”
Never having been thus greeted by a hotel employee, I figured it meant one of two things. Either I was an incredibly important guest and the hotel staff had breathlessly been awaiting my arrival…
…or there was some sort of problem with my room and/or reservation.
“Mr. O’Day, I am very sorry, but there is a problem with your room,” said the flustered desk clerk.
Warily, I asked, “What is the problem?”
“Well….Someone already is in it.”
The hotel was overbooked. The desk clerk — and then the manager, whom I demanded to see — swore they had nothing at all available, not even a suite.
They were very apologetic and explained that a pop music group was staying in the hotel and had unexpectedly extended their stay.
My normal routine of acting stern and stomping my feet did not succeed in making a room become available. Finally, grudgingly, I climbed into another taxi and went to the Radisson SAS Park Hotel, where a replacement room awaited me.
The pop music group? They were in town to perform as back-up to Diana Ross. (Ross herself wasn’t there yet; she would arrive later in her private jet.)
I never did like her much.
It’s a weekly show devoted to the Beatles, on a Classic Rock station.
You know the kind: “Breakfast With The Beatles,” “Brunch With The Beatles,” “Beatles Brunch,” “Sunday Morning With The Beatles,” etc.
The host often creates a “theme” for each week’s program.
That’s a good idea. There’s not much new Beatles music these days, so it’s smart to look for fresh contexts in which to present the familiar music.
But this was a less-than-good idea:
One program was devoted solely to instrumental versions of Beatles songs.
Five hours of instrumentals.
There isn’t a pop music station in the world that would deliberately play two instrumentals in a row.
Five hours of instrumentals??
I don’t blame the host. He doesn’t know better.
Moral: If you’re a program director, do you listen to your weekend hosts? Do you do everything in your power to make your weekend programming sound at least as good as your weekday programming?
Or do you just hand the keys to the station to your part-timers/satellite shows/brokered programs and hope you still have an audience on Monday?
