If you read enough of these things you’ll pick up some common themes, like, Waffle House, “Clarissa Explains It All”, highway rest areas and ‘elements you see at GREAT radio stations’.
One of the things that you almost always see in a great radio station, is they miss nothing. Everything is potentially something they can take and have fun with. For 20 years that was WPGC in DC. They were so hyper-tapped in to that market that it was stoopid™.
Right now, as I’m typing this, the Seahawks just won a trip to Glendale and my email is clogging up with emails from Z-100 in Portland as we strategerize what they should be doing. I’ve seen stations that missed their local teams going to national championships. These people have jobs!! Isn’t that frightening?
A couple of weeks ago a story was trending nationally about a women in San Diego who happened to be on the toilet at work when an 8 foot python decided to exit after exploring the local sewer system. I reached out to John & Tammy at KSON to ask if they were on it, which was kind of stupid because OF COURSE they were on it. It fact the lady was on the air in about 20 minutes.
Then you had the pizza delivery guy in Westport, Massachusetts who was screwed on a tip and openly mocked by employees at a car dealership. Boom. 24 hours later Fun 107 does a campaign and raises $20,000 for the dude and the story went around the world in a nano second.
In the next couple of months, a rite of passage, a significant social event of Tsunamic Proportions (I made that up) is going to occur in the lives of the younger demos: prom.
Every Spring there is a prom story that ends up in the little Top Three Trends list that Facebook has.
It will be something like a developmentally challenged student being elected in a positive way as Prom king or queen.
It will be the students who are banned because they wanted to go as a same sex couple.
It will be the girl who goes with her father the war hero.
It will be the student who is going through chemo who is going to miss out on prom…so the school holds the dance at their hospital.
It might be this kid who won a Twitter war with an NBA player and gets to take the guy’s girlfriend to his prom in Michigan.
In the case of Albany, New York it was a girl who was told she couldn’t go to the prom with her 21 y/o boyfriend because of his age. Normally this might sound creepy but he’d just returned from his third medal-winning tour in Iraq. So my client there, on a week’s notice, put together a prom in her backyard.
These stories are going to happen and if you keep your fingers crossed and are nice and kind to others and throw a little prayer skyward when you go to bed, they’ll happen in your market.
Then, get everyone together and ask the staff, “What’re we going to do with this?”
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