Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

Character development comes in various forms.  When you’re honest with the audience around a topic of high relevance and when you share a story about your life where someone connects with you.  There are many creative ways to do that.  Ornery Sal, Boston’s Best Boss is a regular contributor to Karson and Kennedy, MIX 104.1, Boston.  The team regularly uses him as a foil to do content.  This time, they brought him in to quiz how well he knows the cast members.  They gave him the traditional one to two sentence story, then Sal had to say which cast member experienced that.  He went four for five, proving he does know the show.  But having him to goof with while doing character development is a novel way to get things done and make character development content stickier.

Spirit Airlines went out of business last week.  Even if the airline isn’t in your market, it was a big story that needed to be touched on by everyone.  One of the thresholds to determine if a topic is viable is this – is everyone aware of the story?  They don’t have to be interested in it, they just need to be aware of it.  Familiarity drives our interest in things.  In the trajectory of Topic-Treatment-Tone (credit Coleman Insights), it’s what you do with the topic that makes it engaging and entertaining for the audience.  We are storytellers at our core.  Where lots of shows talked around that topic last week, Moug and Karla, B96, Chicago found two people directly impacted by it.  The first is a passenger who was caught during her travels trying to get to Orlando to photograph a wedding (she has audio of the overhead announcement of the flight being cancelled) and the other is a flight attendant who found out the airline was shutting down mid-flight from a company email.