"Creativity is the art of forgetting where you stole an idea."
In the truest sense of creativity, I can't remember who to credit for that quote and I won't apologize for it. I don't agree with those that insist that nothing is ever original anymore, but certainly the vast majority of ideas come from some outside influence. We build our ideas out of a collection of experiences, standing on the shoulders of someone else's creativity and trying to make it better, or better suited to our situation. Sometimes we just rip ideas off without apology. Here are some ideas I've thought were worth borrowing from the sports arena as I've watch through 2004. Some can be directly transposed to radio, others are meant just as a spark to start the thought process differently.
That damn AFLAC duck...and football
Every college football game he waddles across the screen and we hear that signature sound of a poor man's Daffy Duck impersonation, "AFLAC." Well, actually the AFLAC guys just latched onto a perennial football staple, sports trivia. Sports has the unique advantage of being stat and record driven. Sports also has a slew of fans obsessed with those stats and records. Music has fanatical fans too, and colorful entertaining characters to be fanatical about. Even fluff shows like Extra and Entertainment Tonight use trivia as a retention tool. I've heard a lot of stations feature a trivia benchmark once per day, but usually that is the extent of how this TSL tool is used. I see a larger opportunity to use music trivia and pop culture trivia relevant to your station target as a way to build TSL. This requires some work, however. The questions and answers must be considered content, not just some radio exercise. Television doesn't even use these occasions for contesting, they recognize that the information itself can be entertaining enough to hold our attention. This requires a serious commitment to writing and producing a series of successful trivia questions. Maybe the jocks do it live, maybe its produced with the station voice. The questions can be asked before a stopset or before a short music sweep, with the payoff at the end of either. Regardless, the question and potential answer must be intriguing enough for our listeners to want to hear the answer, ie...to listen longer. ESPN's Sports Center is a master of the creative, intriguing sports trivia question. Sometimes I catch the slides before the movies doing a good job of entertaining....sometimes they are so obvious it is insulting.
Who ever heard of OLN?
Another embarrassingly simple idea I saw was while watching the Outdoor Life Network. I wasn't even aware that my cable provider included OLN in my expanded package until I went looking for coverage of Lance Armstrong's bid for a 5th consecutive Tour title. They certainly did a great job of covering the Tour. Bigger still, they built brand awareness with a new audience by acquiring the rights to an event that transcended the sport of cycling. The simple idea that I witnessed on OLN was half hour commercial free Tour de France coverage brought to you by(insert product here). The interesting effect the sponsored half hour commercial free coverage had on me was that it implied that there would have been stopsets otherwise and therefore I was getting a broadcast with less commercials. I don't know what the normal OLN spot load is, but my perception was that I was getting the good end of this deal. Almost every radio station has a significant music sweep each hour whether it is promoted or not. The next time the GM is yelling for an extra unit or some new source of revenue, I think it might be feasible to look at sponsoring an already existing music sweep. I would certainly prefer adding two 5 second billboards in the front and back of a 30 or 40 minute music sweep that says, "this half hour of commercial free music brought to you by Cingular Wireless" than another 60 second unit or an NTR event to clutter the airwaves. I think the result will be a perception that the listener is getting more music and less commercials because a sponsor is paying for it. Listeners know that radio is trying to turn a buck, let 'em hear that you are trying to turn a buck by giving them more music with less commercials and I think they'll forgive the sponsor tag attached. Let 'em hear that you are turning a buck by making radio better for them instead of by playing endless commercials and they'll welcome a sponsor underwriting it. The sponsored music sweep implies that you are not hearing stopsets where you would have been even if the reality is that everything stayed the same. Sell something you're already doing, sell something that is a positive for the station brand.
Part 2, tomorrow, ideas sparked by the Olympics and the Superbowl...
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