14) The Spring Book
04/03/2008
Today marks the start of the only real “official” Radio Person holiday, The Spring Book. For a Radio Person the Spring Book is like Chanukah except longer and has less candles or any religious connotation. The Spring Book is when Radio People drastically change everything they are doing in order to make a stellar impression on the listener for the next three months and ultimately get the Holy Grail for Radio People…”A Good Spring Book.”
The first thing a good Radio Person does to prepare for a Spring Book is to tighten up. You will hear all sorts of Radio People say they are dropping music, adding music, changing formats, adding talking animals, shifting air shifts around, maybe even air-checking their DJs to make sure everything is tight.
In fact, the cornerstone of a good Spring Book is that everything is tight and once the level of “tightness” is established, the Radio Person then gets to pick their catch phrase de jour for the next three months all of which sound like sexual euphemisms:
04/03/2008
Today marks the start of the only real “official” Radio Person holiday, The Spring Book. For a Radio Person the Spring Book is like Chanukah except longer and has less candles or any religious connotation. The Spring Book is when Radio People drastically change everything they are doing in order to make a stellar impression on the listener for the next three months and ultimately get the Holy Grail for Radio People…”A Good Spring Book.”
The first thing a good Radio Person does to prepare for a Spring Book is to tighten up. You will hear all sorts of Radio People say they are dropping music, adding music, changing formats, adding talking animals, shifting air shifts around, maybe even air-checking their DJs to make sure everything is tight. In fact, the cornerstone of a good Spring Book is that everything is tight and once the level of “tightness” is established, the Radio Person then gets to pick their catch phrase de jour for the next three months all of which sound like sexual euphemisms:“Tight is Right”
“Gonna Tighten Here Down This Weekend”
“If It Ain’t Tight, It Ain’t Right”
“Got to Tighten Down Before My Competition Does”
It is actually a pretty fun exercise, even if you aren’t a troglodyte. All you have to do is take something you would do on a daily basis that might be for recreation and replace that action with the word “tight” or “tighten” and you can create your own Radio Person Spring Book Catch Phrase, which I think the Nintendo Wii version is coming out in 2009.
The next thing you have to do is “Make A Big Splash.” This involves giving something away to your listener that you don’t do for the rest of the year. Could be cash, a car, a boat, or even somebody’s child…
The ideal formula involves a big-ticket item (like a car) surrounded by a contest that would get you exposure on some other media (like TV or Perez Hilton) and has at least a slight probability to land you in jail even if it is for rigging that same contest.
A good one that leaps to mind might be:
“Kill A Konvict for a Korvette”
(make sure to change all the letters to “k” for the alliteration)
Then before you execute the contest, after you have gotten the exposure you reveal that it is just a highly trumped up version of Whack-A-Mole for a chance to drive away in a new car and your Spring Promotion is in the bag
The final thing you have to do is some “Spring Cleaning” of your imaging and positioner, because if you don’t reinvent the station from the ground up for these pivotal three months, you are going to have a bad year my friend. Start by taking all the imaging you currently have and get rid of it and then replace it with new imaging preferably done by the Space Ghost guy, the Master Shake guy, or Don Lafontaine. Then have them say really obscure things like “putting the “o” in iPhone” and sandwich it between those guys reading your new positioner which should be like “The Best Mix of the 80’s, 90’s and Today for the Springtime with more than 96 minutes of music an hour.”
To see it in context it should look like this:
The Best Mix of the 80’s, 90’s and Today for the Springtime with more than 96 minutes of music an hour, we’re putting the “o” in iPhone… The Best Mix of the 80’s, 90’s and Today for the Springtime with more than 96 minutes of music an hour 108.97 WGRR
And that should do it.
Radio People love this time of year when they take the 9 months leading up to today and call it practice in order to completely change the format and feel of the radio station so as to insure having “A Good Spring Book” so they can pitch that to their clients.
See, it really is all about the listeners after all.
“Gonna Tighten Here Down This Weekend”
“If It Ain’t Tight, It Ain’t Right”
“Got to Tighten Down Before My Competition Does”
It is actually a pretty fun exercise, even if you aren’t a troglodyte. All you have to do is take something you would do on a daily basis that might be for recreation and replace that action with the word “tight” or “tighten” and you can create your own Radio Person Spring Book Catch Phrase, which I think the Nintendo Wii version is coming out in 2009.
The next thing you have to do is “Make A Big Splash.” This involves giving something away to your listener that you don’t do for the rest of the year. Could be cash, a car, a boat, or even somebody’s child…
The ideal formula involves a big-ticket item (like a car) surrounded by a contest that would get you exposure on some other media (like TV or Perez Hilton) and has at least a slight probability to land you in jail even if it is for rigging that same contest.A good one that leaps to mind might be:
“Kill A Konvict for a Korvette”
(make sure to change all the letters to “k” for the alliteration)
Then before you execute the contest, after you have gotten the exposure you reveal that it is just a highly trumped up version of Whack-A-Mole for a chance to drive away in a new car and your Spring Promotion is in the bag
The final thing you have to do is some “Spring Cleaning” of your imaging and positioner, because if you don’t reinvent the station from the ground up for these pivotal three months, you are going to have a bad year my friend. Start by taking all the imaging you currently have and get rid of it and then replace it with new imaging preferably done by the Space Ghost guy, the Master Shake guy, or Don Lafontaine. Then have them say really obscure things like “putting the “o” in iPhone” and sandwich it between those guys reading your new positioner which should be like “The Best Mix of the 80’s, 90’s and Today for the Springtime with more than 96 minutes of music an hour.”To see it in context it should look like this:
The Best Mix of the 80’s, 90’s and Today for the Springtime with more than 96 minutes of music an hour, we’re putting the “o” in iPhone… The Best Mix of the 80’s, 90’s and Today for the Springtime with more than 96 minutes of music an hour 108.97 WGRR
And that should do it.
Radio People love this time of year when they take the 9 months leading up to today and call it practice in order to completely change the format and feel of the radio station so as to insure having “A Good Spring Book” so they can pitch that to their clients.
See, it really is all about the listeners after all.
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