DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

Wise and insightful time management video lesson from my friend and mentor, Harold Taylor.

By the way, the blue-shirted audio engineer is another friend — the late, great Terry Moss.

Click here to download the entire time management audio seminar.

I’m on the air, doing my radio show.

The hotline rings.

The station’s receptionist says, “I’m filling out some forms, and I need to know your middle name.”

“I don’t have a middle name.”

(That’s true. My family was so poor my parents couldn’t afford middle names for any of us five kids.)

“Oh, okay,” she says.

Two minutes later, the hotline rings again.

“Well then,” she says, “what’s your middle initial?”

I won’t begin to write radio commercial copy for a client until I understand:

1.  What they sell.

2.  How what they sell helps people; how it adds to the consumer’s life.

3.  Why their customers are willing to spend money for the product or service.

4.  Why their customers choose them and not a competitor.

5.  What stops people who would benefit from and who can afford the product or service from purchasing it.

My “secret” isn’t that I ask those questions. It’s that when I don’t understand one or more of the answers, I keep asking until I do understand.

Sometimes that requires a lot of asking.

When I was in school, I never could understand why most kids never raised their hands to ask a question. Often I’d be the only student with a question.

Was I really the only one in the class who didn’t understand something? Was everybody else that much smarter than I?

Early on I theorized that if I didn’t understand something (and if it wasn’t Geography or Science), there must be others who “didn’t get it” either. But for reasons I never could fathom, they were embarrassed to admit it.

I, however, would keep asking either until I understood or until the teacher threw me out.

Too many copywriters (who, in the U.S., often are radio station account executives) would rather write a radio campaign without understanding what the heck the client actually does and why what they do is important to their customers than to admit, “I don’t understand.”

I’m not embarrassed to say to a client, “I don’t understand what you’re selling. Please explain this to me.”

But I would be embarrassed if I wrote a radio advertising campaign that communicated nothing because I understood nothing.

Ironic Bonus

Often after having forced a client to keep explaining the product or service, stripping away all the jargon and using language that even I could understand, I’ll be told:

“Wow, Dan, you’re pretty clever. You made me really think about what it is we do here. You  got me thinking about it from the customer’s perspective. You’re one sly fellow, using that ‘Socratic method’ on me.”

As though I knew the answers all along and was just trying to get the other person to verbalize it.

Nope, I just kept asking what I call “naive” questions…because Selling Is Educating. And I can’t educate someone else about something I don’t understand myself.

A Loyal Reader Asks:

“What should be the role of someone who produces a show but is not the star of it?”

First, you should know that “producer” means different things in different cultures.

To many European radio people, “producer” = “boss.” This most often happens in public radio environments, much less frequently at commercial stations.

I always find it amusing when someone from a European station pays for consulting advice from someone whose sole qualification is that s/he once worked as “(American Radio Star)’s morning show producer.”

They think that means that person was the star’s boss. Sorry, no.

Although the station pays the producer’s salary (with a few top-tier exceptions in which the highly paid star hires and pays for his own staff), the producer is there to serve the air talent — even though the producer also is prey to the expectations, demands and whims of the program director.

I’ve worked with some large European public broadcasters that employ the “state” or “national” model they inherited from the days when they had no competition.

In some instances, although the producer wasn’t “the boss,” she decided what topics, guests and features would be included in the day’s program. With that model, the host essentially is handed the outline for each day’s show and it’s his job to bring it to life.

That’s a very efficient model.

But in radio, what’s most efficient rarely is most effective.

It’s much more effective when the on-air talent has a vision for the program and it’s the producer’s job to help bring that vision to life.  

With that background, here’s my answer to the question….

The producer’s role is to:

• Make the host look good.

• Make the guests (both “celebrities” and listeners) look good.

• Make sure the program always is moving forward, that at any given moment it has a goal.