Far too many radio disc jockeys and would-be voice over performers think their voice is their single most important tool.
Morgan Freeman’s comment applies to anyone who ever speaks into a microphone.
A Loyal Reader Writes:
“I have been struggling with this for several years now. I work in Small Market USA. I am the program director, morning host and FM afternoon voice tracker. The News Director does the AM news and is part of the morning show. The Promotions Director is the morning co-host and comes in at 7am.
“My problem, if you haven’t already figured it out: We have other duties at the station; when do we show prep? We can’t do it before the show, because the news guy is doing news things and the female co-host isn’t in yet.
“Luckily, we have some pretty good chemistry and can wing it 70% of the time. But what about the other 30%?
“The show is mostly talk, in 10-minute segments. I’ve tried writing a morning outline, but we almost never follow it. And when we do, everyone is just seeing it for the first time at 6 or 7am; no one has any time to prepare their thoughts.
“We subscribe to a couple of daily show prep services, which help. Unfortunately, living in a small town, we never have a full phone bank to fall back on. People rarely phone in to comment on the ‘call-in’ topics (unless it’s local, but we get maybe two things per month worth making a show out of).
“We’ve tried prepping for the next morning and for the following week, but I personally hate ‘Hey, it’s National Aspirin Day! So we’re going to call the mayor of Aspirintown USA and talk with him all morning.’
“I get really frustrated when we hit one of those ‘Hmm…Now what do we talk about with 5 minutes left before the news’ walls. I remember you saying in your Morning Show Ratings Explosion that you
can tell a morning show isn’t prepared when you hear
them they say, ‘Well, uh, OKAY!’ We’ve had plenty of those moments.“Bottom line: We don’t have the luxury of time to meet every day.
“The show is off the air at 10:00, we take five minutes to unwind and then the phones are ringing, the website needs fixing, some part-timer needs the night off, I get an hour of studio time to cut some spots, lift some feeds, track the afternoon show and record the client who came in because the sales lady thinks he’s cute and has a good voice (when his teeth are in).
“We can’t be the only station with this problem, can we?”
1. Morning radio shows that base their programs on the silliness found in Chase’s Calendar of Annual Events inevitably are boring and inane.
The “National Aspirin Day” listings are not events; they’re words in a book or on a website.
2. You’ve (unknowingly) identified the problem with your attempts to get listeners to call in:
Most of the time, you’re trying to get them to respond to topics suggested by show prep services.
But when do they actually call in? When it’s local.
Everything you talk about on your show should be “local.”
But that doesn’t mean the event has to occur in or the controversy emanate from your town.
“Local” = anything that is of interest to your listeners. Or that you can make interesting to your listeners.
If it’s something your listeners would talk about at lunch or at the water cooler or in the pub, it’s local.
On “National Aspirin Day,” do you think even a single one of your listeners will be talking about that “event”? Unlikely. So why would you?
But when you talk about something local…something you care about…something your listeners care about….That’s when the phones light up.
Much more importantly, that’s when your audience gets involved with what’s happening on your show.
3. Have all morning show team members carry with them at all times a pocket-sized notebook in which they scribble every idea they have. That would include:
- Everyday things that annoy them
- Observations made while going about their daily lives
- Their emotional responses to all elements of their lives
- Random philosophical musings
- “How do they do that?” musings
- Unexpected childhood memories
- Humorous reactions to everyday life
- Humorous reactions to things in the news
- Intriguing snatches of overheard conversations
- Ideas for bits, call-ins, characters, etc.
4. Create a grid representing each hour of your radio program. You can adapt or expand upon your program clock.
5. Before you go to bed at night, fill in as much of the grid as you can — doing your best to balance the program so that, for example, you don’t air your two song parodies in the same hour or introduce two new, unrelated characters in the same hour.
6. When you drive to work in the early morning, listen to an all-news station — with a notebook or mini-recorder within arm’s reach.
7. Arrive at the station early enough to allow 30 minutes (yes, it’s painful) to fill in the rest of that morning’s grid.
Note: The grid is not something you are required to follow slavishly. If a topic suddenly seizes hold of the show and runs with it, some of the items you’ve prepared will have to wait for another morning.
But that grid is your safety net. If nothing sets the phones on fire and no tantalizing tangent presents itself, that grid will ensure that you still deliver a balanced, well prepared radio program.
When I hear this kind of inane radio commercial produced by a small market radio station, I assume the copywriter is a novice who hasn’t yet learned the craft.
But when it’s a national spot for a major brand…
The story of that commercial is “the engineer/producer keeps putting dumb music under the narrator’s voice, thereby annoying the narrator.”
That story has absolutely nothing to do with what’s being advertised.
You could replace all the copy related to the advertiser without touching the (clichéd and pointless) “story.”
Unfortunately for Chevy, if listeners remember anything at all from a radio advertisement, it will be contained in the story that is told.
Fun Statistic
Percentage of audience members who will listen to the last 31 seconds of this spot?
Zero.
A Loyal Reader Writes:
“My morning show partner is asking me to keep personal events/situations out of our on-air conversations because she’s tired of people asking questions about her private life. I told her this kind of personal detail is what makes the listener identify with us.
“I’m not saying we should be like Howard Stern and tell EVERYTHING, but embarrassing stories, going to the dentist or doctor, all that kind of stuff (as long as it’s entertaining and we know where it’s going) should be in play, don’t you think?”
It all depends upon what you want to accomplish.
I get the impression that your goal is to maximize your ratings, while your partner’s goal is to do her job and then live her life without the two ever intersecting.
If listeners frequently ask about her personal life, that means they’re interested in her as a person.
If they’re interested in her as a person, her on-air presence is making some sort of personal impact on the audience. Apparently your listeners think of her not as an “announcer” but as a human being.
Everything else being equal, an interesting human being will garner a larger audience than an impersonal announcer. It’s a simple fact: People relate to people, not to announcers.
Your partner needs to ask herself, “Why am I part of a morning team? Why are there two of us instead of just one?”
If all you do is identify the songs and read the liner cards, one of you is superfluous.
The fact that your station has installed a 2-person team as its morning show suggests the station’s strategy is not to limit the program to time & temp. Two people should equal two sets of life experiences.
But there’s no away around it: A successful radio personality is a celebrity, and with celebrityhood comes a certain loss of privacy and a presumed intimacy between you and some of your fans.
life experiences.
There’s nothing wrong with your partner wanting to keep her private life private. But if she restricts herself to being just a voice on the radio, she’s putting an artificially low ceiling on your show’s potential ratings.
