In 1967, when Paul McCartney was 24 years old, a newspaper reporter asked him if he’d ever taken LSD.
McCartney had three choices:
1) Tell the truth: He had taken LSD.
2) Lie and say he never had.
3) Refuse to answer — thereby effectively saying “yes.”
He answered the reporter’s question honestly.
This TV interviewer thinks McCartney’s answer was irresponsible. But McCartney puts the blame for “spreading the news” squarely where it belongs….
Legendary radio program director Chuck Blore with the first-hand account of a promotion at KFWB/Los Angeles that….
Well, let Chuck tell it….
As I Recall, Every Friday Is Something-Or-Other Night Here At The Sheraton Skyline Hotel
July, 1996 (continued): As I mentioned in our last installment, July saw me back in London for the European version of PD Grad School, which was held at the Sheraton Skyline Hotel across the street from Heathrow Airport.
This, by the way, is a very convenient location for anyone who needs to spend the night prior to catching a flight from Heathrow. A few notes on my stay there….
Although the hotel is quite nice, their food is perhaps the blandest I’ve ever experienced.
Yes, “British cuisine” is considered by many to be an oxymoron. But even in England, if you ate a meal described as “chicken curry,” you would expect to be able to taste at least a slight hint of curry. This food, however, was 100% flavor-free.
The Sheraton was very modern…so modern that during my entire stay I was unable to figure out how to operate the panel that controlled my suite’s light fixtures. Whenever I wanted to turn something on or off, I would hit buttons at random until I achieved the desired result.
(One of our guest speakers, Rasa Kaye, confided to me that she, too, was unable to decipher her room’s lighting code.)
During my Sunday morning session, a very foul odor permeated our meeting room. We never did learn what caused it. (At least we can assume it wasn’t the hotel’s food, given its complete lack of sensory impact.)
But the highlight of my stay was witnessing a screaming match — in the hotel lobby — between the hotel’s concierge and the driver of one of the airport shuttle buses. They found themselves in violent disagreement regarding which airport terminal a departing guest should be taken to.
A while ago, a jock wrote to me, asking for advice:
“I’m trying to build my on-air radio career, and I’d really like to play up the fact that I’m female, to develop a female personality.
“My concern is that I would offend a male audience.
“Do my listeners want to know about me? Do they care? Should I make them care?
“I have never believed that the sexes are equal…rather that we are uniquely different.”
I do not believe one needs to play up the obvious. Assuming that the listener can tell from your voice that you are a female, why bother to stress what the listener always knows?
If you are a woman and you have a personality, you will be a female personality.
Your desire should be to develop a personality. Your personality.
Whoever you are should be reflected in that personality: gender, age, race, sexual preference, childhood, intelligence, prejudices, fears, desires, hobbies, habits, spirituality (or lack of).
(Note I said “reflected,” not “mirrored.” I am not suggesting these things should be held up on a placard for your audience to see; I am suggesting that who you really are should have an impact on who you appear to be on-air.)
If as an air talent you see yourself as uniquely different because of your gender vs. uniquely different because of who you are as a human being (which includes gender among 10,000 other important variables), you are limiting yourself.
To take a female example, Oprah Winfrey is successful not because she’s so different from male talk show hosts. She’s successful because she’s so different (i.e., smarter, better prepared, more thoughtful, talented, intuitive and ambitious) than most talk show hosts, period.
Her success is not due to her presenting herself as “a woman” or “as an African-American” or an “African-American woman” or a “single woman” or a “single African-American woman”; it is due to her bringing herself onto the stage every day, with all the components that self comprises.
You are putting on blinders by asking if someone might be alienated if you share the most interesting parts of your life with them.
Do they want to know? They can’t answer that in advance.
Do they care? If you share it in a way that they can relate to, yes.
Should you make them care? Absolutely.
In concentrating upon developing yourself as a female personality, you are rushing headlong into the female radio ghetto to which (mostly male) program directors have assigned women over the years…and which many have struggled to overcome for their entire careers.
If you ask me for sources of information/instruction on developing a personality, I can offer some suggestions.
But helping you develop a “female personality” would be helping you buy a one-way ticket to that ghetto.
A Loyal Reader Writes:
You ridicule those “screaming car dealer” commercials. But they
work, don’t they? Isn’t that why car dealers insist on airing them?
No, they don’t work. Those screaming ads increase the public’s awareness of the car dealer not because they scream but because they’re aired so frequently. One of the great powers of radio advertising, remember? Frequency.
They could simply repeat “Ed’s Toyota is a wonderful to place to buy a new car,” and if that message aired as often as the Screaming Spot, it would deliver at least the same result.
It is possible to create a commercial that is far more effective than either of those models, of course. But when your local Screaming Car Dealer says, “We scream because it works,” the truth is simply, “It works because we make full use of radio’s Reach and Frequency.”
