This tip is for music stations.

If you don’t know who John Wooden is, you’re probably not a basketball fan.  Wooden, called “The Wizard of Westwood,” won TEN NCAA national championships in a 12-year period as head coach at UCLA, including a record seven in a ROW.  (No other team has won more than four in a row.)  Many of his players became NBA stars, often Hall of Famers like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Gail Goodrich, and Bill Walton.

Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” has become the Bible to dozens of present-day coaches, and one of the things adjacent to it is his list of “12 Lessons in Leadership,” one of which is “Little things make big things happen.”

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This is what I hear a lot of the time nowadays: A jock stops down in the middle of two songs for no apparent reason.  Then he or she reads some idiotic story from the internet that most people saw five days ago, adding a C-minus punch line.  (Or the jock does some piece of trivia, or some “cheerful thought for the day”.)  Then they lurch forward into another song.

But back in the day, when radio had tons of forward momentum and much bigger ratings, there was this thing called the “Q” format.  It was somewhat the same as the Drake format, in that jocks talked over song intros (and at the end of a music sweep, the jock talked at the end of the last song, of course, and did some Content into a commercial break).  But the Q format was often thought of as screaming, hundred-mile-an-hour jocks cramming as much as they could into an intro before the vocal hit.

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Telling a story is like being on a see-saw.  On one end is that you want to share something.  On the other end is not wasting the listener’s time.

Here are some rules to help you NOT be the person who takes a long time to tell a story that doesn’t matter:

The first line or two will be what “tethers” your subject matter to the listener – or not.  Start abruptly into something that isn’t timely or relevant to the listener, and you’re dead in the water already.  Spend too long getting into it, again… dead.

Add only the essential details, and let vocabulary and attitude, fueled by Emotions, fill it out.  More facts than we need, names we don’t know, too much setting up who someone is, etc. will kill the story.

End with something we DIDN’T hear earlier in the story.  The ending should surprise, delight, or inform.  Try not to use cornball punch lines.  The “that’s what SHE said” type of line is beaten to death.

Here’s an example, from a team show I worked with:

T: Oh, check your mail today.  You may get the coupon that I got yesterday.  It was for a new product, called “Spam lite.”

B: What do they leave out… to make Spam lite?

T: I don’t know… the snout?

That’s how easy it is, and how little time it takes, to serve up something that the listener will REMEMBER.  (On the air, even with the station’s name, artist, song title, and the team’s name leading off the break, this took only about 20 seconds.  But it’s never really about length.  It’s about IMPACT.)

Believe it or not, there are some instances when a really good talent will foul the ball off his own shin.  It happens to baseball players, and it most assuredly happens to air talent.

Case in point, recently a wonderful talent spent time (a setup, followed by two phone calls) setting up a little factoid about how we really only use about 13% of the things we learned in school.

Right at the outset, there are several things wrong with this:

1. It’s not particularly timely, which means it’s largely irrelevant, because it’s not top-of-mind TODAY.  (Where does this rank on the list of the things that are most important to your listener today, 150^th? 250^th?)
     
2. It relies on using a percentage, which automatically makes it sound “left-brain” driven, as opposed to something more “right-brain” and visual and creative, and…

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Here’s a little something that happened in a recent session with a great morning team in Austin.  I always try to do video sessions, and during this one, they were on location somewhere.

As we talked, I could see people behind them looking in the window.  The people were just curious, wonder what they were doing, and what the two of them were like.

And that’s what happens every time someone tunes in, too.

It’s kind of like a remark that Garry Shandling made to Jerry Seinfeld in a “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” episode when they talked about seeing Robin Williams for the first time: “You don’t remember what he SAID so much as you remember what he WAS.”

So think about who YOU are, to the listener.  Are you just another person “broad stroke” over-performing, larger than life – but not in a good way?  Or are you someone I can identify with, who’s entertaining, but also surprisingly down to earth and someone I’d like to hang out with?

What you project is a choice.  Choose wisely, because Shandling was right.