The Word that Killed Content

The objective of any announcer or on air team is to engage the audience and as I’ve previously said, shift their listening from background to foreground and over time convert them from a P2 to a P1 listener.

There are many techniques that help with engaging audiences and they can be woven into the delivery of the content. For example, leveraging story telling and humour, varying vocal delivery and pace and reflection and imagination can be used very effectively to captivate the audience, but its doesn’t just happen.

When I was working for the UK based GWR Group in the early 2000’s they would have regular morning show boot camps where all their breakfast shows would get together for two days of workshops on content creation. They were an excellent investment and at each bootcamp the CEO of GWR Steve Orchard would deliver an opening address. Steve was an excellent speaker and I remember sitting in the audience and being so impressed by what he said and how he said it. I sat there and thought, I’ve got a lot to learn, for the way he wove those techniques of story telling, humour, varying the vocal delivery and pace etc was humbling and he made it seem effortless.

He certainly captivated the audience and effective audience engagement is essential as it creates a connection with the audience, enhances retention of information, and increases the overall impact of the content and therefore helps with recall which we know is important for all diary based research methodologies.

Stepping through those techniques:

1. Leverage Storytelling and Humour: Integrate anecdotes, or appropriate humour to humanise the content and evoke emotional responses. Stories provide relatable context.

2. Vary Vocal Delivery and Pacing: Employ vocal variety in tone, pitch, volume, and speed to avoid monotony. Strategic pauses and emphasis on key points can heighten drama and focus attention.

3. Encourage Reflection and Imagination: Prompt the audience to reflect on personal experiences or imagine scenarios related to the topic.

After the 2nd Morning Show Bootcamp I attended, I was sitting with Viv Miles, who was from Wales and one of the development coaches at GWR and I said to him, “what a talent to be able to speak like that, I’m very envious”. Viv then proceeded to tell me the amount of work Steve put into making those speeches. He writes and rewrites them till he feels they’re in a good place. Then he rehearses them many times, and then he sits down with Viv and they go through the speech, fine tuning the pauses, the inflections, the emphasis and the change of pace etc. Viv would say things like “just hold that pause a for an extra second and a half”. He made it look effortless because of the work he put in before hand. It just doesn’t happen.,

There are hundreds of anecdotes that illustrate the importance of preparation if you want to engage an audience. I remember reading in an article once that Sir Anthony Hopkins reads a script 200 times so he’s completely familiar with not just his lines but everyone’s lines. This enables him to improvise with total confidence. If he goes off script he can come back on script without missing a key part of the scene. Again, It just doesn’t happen.

Most on air talent dislike the word preparation and in some cases it’s understandable as it does have a bad reputation, due mainly to an era when Content Directors used to be prescriptive with how and when on-air talent should plan their show, then in the late 1990’s the word that killed content appeared. Well, killed is being slightly dramatic but I wanted to get your attention. The word was Organic. It became the new buzz word and was a word that was misused in my view. Many on-air talent and on-air teams saw it as a way of avoiding preparing their show as they wanted the content to develop organically. I even heard of one show that rather than getting the producer to prep the callers took them direct to air and they went through the arduous process of asking the caller, their name, where they lived, what they do for a living etc wasting valuable minutes when as you know “you don’t have as much time as you think you do”

One could argue that the organic approach to content resulted in a reduction in the overall quality of radio content. Now, I’m generalising of course, as not all on-air talent stopped preparing their shows but the number of exceptional shows on the radio were not as numerous as they once were. The mistake was to misinterpret the word organic. What was meant by organic content was that the content had to sound like it was organically created, that it didn’t sound like it was made up or staged. It wasn’t about letting the content develop organically but delivering it in a way that sounded organic, that it just happened, and that was a real skill that required preparation and planning. If you’re on-air then you need to be entertaining and unless you are Robin Williams then to expect to be entertaining without any preparation and planning is unrealistic to say the least.

Of course not all content is planned, I accept that, but when you look back on the great shows of the past, Kenny Everett from the UK and Martin and Molloy from Australia, to take just two examples, were shows that sounded effortless but the reality was they just didn’t happen. The level of preparation that went into those shows was legendary and as radio struggles to remain relevant today it needs more quality shows that engage the audience through exceptional content that sounds like it is organic. The challenge is that with radio not evolving fast enough to capture much needed incremental revenue the cutting of budgets to balance the books means the industry is not developing talent and shows as it once did and the incentive for a Martin and Molloy to enter the industry is just not there and it’s that short term thinking that is perhaps what’s slowly killing content. It’s not beyond saving though and 2026 could be a defining year for the industry.

Happy New Year.