DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

At the beginning of my radio career, I had three milestones that I dreamed of achieving.

The one that seemed the most unreachable, ironically, is the one that most people probably would see as the easiest:

To earn at least $200 per week.

I don’t know why that was so important or seemed, at times, unreachable; in order to pursue a radio career I had left a job that paid $734 per month. (I remember the figure because at the time, that was pretty darn good money.)

The second: To work in a major market.

The third: To have radio stations offer me jobs, rather than my seeking them out.

Luckily, I did reach all three milestones.

But man, for a while that $200 per week seemed so far off….

Each member of a morning radio show should have a unique attitude to bring to the mix.

One might be the health nut, another the intellectual, another the party animal. The trick is to deliberately balance your program so that at any given moment the audience has someone with whom to identify.

Consider the characters on Cheers, one of the most successful TV sitcoms ever produced. Every major character differs from the others both physically and behaviorally.

Notice how easy it is to identify each from a quick physical description:

• Tall, handsome man

• Thin, perky blonde

• Fat slob

• Young, handsome farm boy

• Short, dark woman

• Middle-aged guy in postal uniform

Just one glance at the screen and you can spot each of them immediately.

And it’s just as easy to identify each from a thumbnail behavioral description:

• Womanizer

•Pretentious, flaky blonde. (Now we’re using blonde as the sociological stereotype, not as a physical description.)

•Lazy beer guzzler

•Dumb and good-natured

• Acerbic

• Boor, always trying to impress others

Think about your morning show. Can the listener identify each team member in “just one glance”— i.e., by hearing just a couple of words spoken?

Or are the voices (pitch, cadence, accent) so similar that the listener often isn’t sure just who is talking at any given moment?

Notice what your team members say. If you reviewed a transcript of a particular break, would you be able to identify each character by his or her dialogue? Or is what they’re saying interchangeable?

Too many morning shows feature three, four or five voices…but they’re all saying the same thing. They all have the same point of view, which leads to the audience hearing a lot of:

“You got that right.”

“You can say that again.”

“You said it.”

Someone once pointed out that if you and I agree on everything, then one of us is superfluous. That definitely applies to a radio morning show.

Chemistry

I’ve been preaching the importance of “casting” and “positioning” the characters on your show since 1984.

Back then, I’d never heard anyone else talk about that. Today, practically every consultant recognizes the importance of “character” to any team show. (“Character” also applies to any radio program, by the way.)

During the past several years, a number of people have sought to apply principles of the TV sitcom model to radio.

While the two forms have a lot in common, there are some important differences you should be aware of.

1. In a sitcom, first the characters are defined, then the actors are cast. In a morning show, typically characters grow out of the individual performers.

2. The key to success in a sitcom is the quality of the writing. The key to success in a morning show is the chemistry among the team members.

Most successful sitcoms could have succeeded with completely different cast members. As hard as it may be to imagine anyone other than Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker, any number of good actors could have succeeded with that role.

Even for shows built around a specific performer (Bill Cosby, Jerry Seinfeld, etc.), the supporting roles could have been cast to equal success using different actors. (I know: You can’t believe anyone else could be Kramer.)

Look at it this way: Mork & Mindy might well have failed with a different Mork, but probably it  still would have been a hit with a different Mindy.

A sitcom succeeds first because of the writing and then because of the casting.

In a morning show, chemistry is everything. Even with a one-person show, it succeeds or fails due to the chemistry of the host and the audience.

There are plenty of successful sitcoms in which the actors dislike each other. (Perhaps the most famous example is Fred & Ethel on I Love Lucy. In real life William Frawley and Vivian Vance were said to have hated each other.)

With a good script and good direction, good comedy actors can appear to create on-screen sparks that don’t exist in real life. But radio teammates who don’t have (and are unable to develop) a good working rhythm are doomed to failure.

On the other hand, great chemistry can make stars of radio people who never would reach such heights as solo performers.

Yahoo! must have changed advertising agencies since they aired radio commercials that were so good I praised them and held them up in my radio advertising seminars as examples of how to use radio effectively.

Here’s a sample from their latest campaign….

Radio advertising paints pictures.

The pictures you paint are what the listener will remember. Knowing this, you want to paint pictures of the results promised by the product or service.

What pictures do you retain from that commercial? Some kid outside a rock club? (Even that, by the way, is badly done. If he’s outside the arena, why does he sound as though he’s speaking from a recording booth?)

So they use this young man’s voice to paint pictures of…whatever….But when — 18 seconds into the spot — they get around to what Yahoo is trying to sell, they bring in an announcer who attempts to sell it solely with words, without painting any memorable, relevant pictures.

Last year I was hired was to critique radio commercials that were produced by beginners — by people who’d had no training or experience in radio commercial copywriting but who found themselves having to produce spots every day.

Whenever a spot included someone talking about doing something online, invariably there’d be the sound effect of someone typing on a keyboard. Repeatedly I found myself explaining that the listener doesn’t need to hear a typing sound effect in order to picture someone doing something online and that, in fact, the typing usually distracts the listener from the intended message.

But those were beginners I was talking to, so I forgave them.

I don’t forgive whoever produced the mess you just heard.