Every day, radio personalities spend hours in show prep creating content they think is pretty good. Then they perform it on the air. Sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t get the traction it could or should. It’s frustrating when great ideas fall just short. A little more time in prep can make content more important.
But there are barriers. Prep time is limited, and there’s only so much truly great material to power a show.
One of the barriers to red-hot content on the air is that there’s just not enough time in the day to make each break sizzle. There are so many breaks.
If a radio show performs 4 breaks an hour, and the show is on 4 hours a day, that’s 64 fresh breaks every week. 64!
Who can create that much “A” material? Saturday Night Live can’t do it. Kimmel can’t, either. In fact, add the total breaks of the major late night TV talk shows, and they aren’t generating that much fresh, original material. And they have staffs!
So what happens? We accept that some breaks are just okay. Soon, this becomes the new standard, with more and more average breaks. Talent then falls into a rut, cranking out a lot of material each day, but nothing that really stands out.
So what’s the magic formula? Is there a trick to getting more attention for content? In most cases, breaks don’t fail because of the lack of time devoted to preparation. They fail because we spread prep time over too much material. This is happening at a time when we should be making content more important, not less.
