RELENTLESS RADIO

 

Author:	Hollywood Henderson
Published:	September, 2000

 

"Time to start thinking about the HOLIDAYS!? You've got to be KIDDING!" Actually, each year I seem to become more resigned to the fact that time flies by quickly. It no longer amazes me that Christmas seems to get here faster every year. So, what do I have to say, as one air personality to another, about preparing for the annual holiday extravaganza? Let's start with what I think is the most important thing: keeping true to the spirit of the holiday, that is, celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. If you keep this as your context throughout the season, then everything else will fall into place. Make time to get into a house of worship, attend the special services and events. I don't think it's necessary to get to every ONE of them, but I do think that your participation here will help give you a sense of balance and peace that can only make your performance on the air (and OFF the air, too!) better. Similarly, make sure you have enough time with loved ones. Pencil it in NOW if necessary. Can you get some time off during the holidays? Even a day off somewhere NEAR the holidays will work wonders. Ask for it NOW! Put in that request to your PD and let him or her know that you'd like this day or that week. Don't wait until a week or two before, and then stew about it because everybody ELSE asked first and now you're stuck working. What about your show? Should you approach it any differently during the holidays than you would the rest of the year? I would say so. I know that the following words may not go over that well with program directors, but I think you should shift down a gear during the holidays, attitude-wise, at least during the week before and after Christmas. Let's face it, no Arbitron diaries are being kept during those weeks, and even if they were, you have to face the inescapable fact that listeners are just as distracted and busy with the holiday schedule as YOU are. People are less engaged by your radio show during the holidays than anytime else, so it makes sense that you can relax a little bit. I'm not saying you should "coast," or that the preparation and execution of your show during the holidays is unimportant. I'm only saying that people use the radio differently during the holidays, and therefore your show can reflect that. You can be more "warm and fuzzy." You can, if your PD will let you, be freer with the formatics, maybe throwing in a holiday song here or a phone bit or "greeting" there. As I write this, I'm thinking back to the many Christmas seasons I've spent as an air personality, and of some of the things I've done on the air during the holidays that I thought were fun. I remember one year the station promotion director was doing the annual end-of-year cleaning out of the prize closet, and discovered that we had some pretty cool odds and ends left over. So all week the week before Christmas we'd give the stuff away on the air. The great thing about it, though, was the WAY we did it. We told people that we had this big Christmas tree in the studio and there were all kinds of gifts underneath it. Then, whenever we'd do the contest, the correct caller would get to "choose" a present from under the tree. We'd really have fun with this, describing the "packages". "There's one with blue and pink stripes, and another with really UGLY holly berry pattern, and look, somebody stuck something in a 'Care Bears' birthday bag, must have been (night jock). Which one would you like?" Then the listener would choose, and we'd take a piece of newspaper and tear it up like we were unwrapping the present on the radio, that's EXACTLY what it would sound like! We'd say "Ooooo! Ohhh! LOOOK!" just like on Christmas morning! It was pure "theater of the mind" and the listeners LOVED it! Another thing I used to do was the "audio Christmas card." Very simple, you just go on the air, say that you're putting together an audio Christmas card that you're gonna play in about a half hour or so, and if you'd like to be on it and wish somebody a Merry Christmas, call now. Then you tape the greetings, and edit them together until you have about a minute's worth of stuff, be sure that people keep it brief, so that you can get lots of voices in there. Go into the production room and pull out one of those generic sixty-second Christmas commercial music beds, and use that as bed for the "card." Set it up on the air, hit the tape, roll the bed underneath and it'll sound great! End with a jingle or go into a holiday song. It really works well. A variation on this is using celebrity voices that your MD or PD may have collected during the year when they visited the station to promote an album or concert. Our PD here in Dallas always has the artist record a Christmas greeting for exactly this purpose, and we've found that even if an artist "doesn't do drops for stations," they usually WILL record a holiday message. You can even string together NON-Christmas greetings from artists, and it'll sound fine as long as you END with a holiday greeting, like this: "Hi this is Celine Dion (edit) This is Christina Aguilera (edit) HI! We're the Backstreet Boys" (edit) Hey, this is Mandy Moore, wishing you and your family a very Merry Christmas!" (jingle). One of the better station contests I've been a part of at the holidays is the home decoration contest. This is where you offer prizes to the people who decorate their homes the best. You can offer prizes in several different categories such as traditional/tasteful, "National Lampoon," non-electric, and so on. We've always made it a requirement that the station call letters be used prominently somewhere in the display, so that we get the added benefit of, well, free advertising!! After you've talked about the contest for a couple of days, you start having people send in postcards or faxes notifying you of their addresses so that you can send jocks or whoever out to the houses to judge the displays. Of course, you don't TELL anybody that you're coming, you just let them know that you could be coming by at any time. THAT way they'll keep the display burning ALL the time and you get more free advertising! A few days during the run of the contest, you announce that the station spotters will be out THAT NIGHT so "be SURE to have your lights on!" This contest has worked really well every time we've done it, so I highly recommend it! You'd be amazed what lengths people will go to in decorating their house, if they feel like they might win a prize. What about Christmas music? How soon should you start playing it? How much should you play? Which artists? Well, since I'm not a music director, I can't speak with any authority on this one. I can only think back to what my general experience has been. Usually, you start the day after Thanksgiving with your first Christmas song and the obligatory acknowledgment of the start of the Christmas season. Then you pretty much leave it alone until about two weeks before Christmas, that's when you start playing a Christmas song maybe once a show. The following week, the week before Christmas, you up that to a Christmas song every hour. It stays that way thru noon Christmas Day, and then you yank it all off the radio until next year. While I'm on the subject, I've always felt that the stations I've worked at have never really taken advantage of the Christmas albums put together by the major artists. Almost every year, one or more of your core acts will release an album of Christmas songs. For us, last year it was N-Sync, and this year it's Christina Aguilera. My feeling is that these tracks can be really valuable. Most of these songs are old holiday standards, meaning they're instantly familiar with the listener. And you get the added "star power" of the artist's current popularity, so what's to lose? Of course, there's no research to fall back on to back this, that's usually the reason these songs DON'T get played. At least that's been my experience. So have a Merry Christmas! Relax! Enjoy! Have some fun on the radio! Have some more fun when you get off! And remember the whole point of the holiday, to honor the One who came into the world to save us from our sin, Jesus Christ!