The Theme Week Morning Show Approach To Hallmark Holidays

KSFM in Sacramento has been a monster for many years. Just one of those really successful stations that is consistent and large and fun. One of the secrets to their winning has been great morning shows. They’ve consistently had great morning shows. Lots of them, but all great.

One of these shows was Davey D and Chris Lane. God they were good. And early one 1st Q I was hanging out in Sacramental and we were discussing Valentines and what they should do as a morning show for it. As you should do, so did we: we went over the radio landscape of the market and reviewed what the other shows in town traditionally did. Because you never want to do what another station does. I then whipped out my file of 8000 (now it’s 12,000) potential contests, topics, bits, features of other non-pigeon-holeable “stuff” that they could do for Valentines.

Chris flipped through it, looked up and said “I wish we could do even half of this.”

And so we tried and thus was born “Love Week”.

As opposed to waiting for the morning of the 14th to acknowledge something that had been puking all over the audience for weeks, every morning that week they did something, and they mixed up the pitch count so there was a pattern of variety.

Monday? They helped a shy guy get introduced to his secret crush.

Tuesday? Bawdy: sex for sale. They talked with hookers.

Wednesday? They talked with listeners who were dating co-workers under the radar.

Thursday? They helped someone with a surprise proposal.

Friday? They found the listeners grandparents who’d been married the longest and they gave love advice. Old people are great.

So, it’s fairly difficult to turn on the TV, go out in public or otherwise emerge from your apocalypse bunker and not see that Halloween has already arrived. To wait on the morning show to acknowledge it until the 31st is pretty lame. In fact, you’ll kind of look like you’ve been in a time warp for 30 days.

Thus…Halloweek, as done by numerous Paige Clients (TM pending).

How would it play out in 2013, as an example?

Monday? Interview a vampire. And they’re out there. Just Google them.

Tuesday? Ghosts Of Halloween’s Past. Bad costumes from listeners elementary school years

Post, vote and the winner gets a costume from a client.

Wednesday? Phobic Co-Worker Wednesday. Help listeners torture co-workers and friends with OCD and irrational fears like clowns.

Thursday? Go out and do a ghost investigation.

See? That was easy. Every TV show will have a Halloween episode, some channels will do weeks of themed programming. There are a lot of lessons we can learn from TV if we’re wise enough to be looking for them.