ELECTION DAY REMINDS US: ANNOUNCERS TALK -- BUT CAN THEY SAY ANYTHING?

IF YOU DON’T TEACH AD-LIB SKILLS, WHO WILL?

Now, this may be a challenge to you, especially if your stations employ only one or two announcers—more so if you don’t come from programming. But you’re a radio station manager, it’s 2010, and this has been overlooked for too long:

Ad-libbing is becoming a lost art.

I don’t mean yocking around on the morning show; I’m talking about the ability to take something interesting and wing it, anytime, anywhere. If your talent can’t do that, your station loses much of the “pop” that makes radio vital. Regardless of how much or little local programming you broadcast, your talent must be able to ad-lib intelligently. If it can’t, you can’t truly sell and you can’t generate immediacy, excitement, everything that makes great radio happen.

Before I reveal why ad-libbing matters, consider how more than a generation of announcers on America’s radio stations comes to the mike with few or no abilities to speak “off the cuff”:

• After decades of liner-reading, many music format jocks can’t ad-lib because they’ve never had to. In fact, they’ve rarely been allowed to say anything that wasn’t carefully scripted as liners;
• With jobs so hard to find, few want to ripple the waters by sharing an original observation;
• Diminishing local news coverage has removed on-the-spot live descriptions of spot news from the workdays of all except the few remaining field reporters at large market news stations;
• When even major market stations permit commercial remotes to be conducted entirely from bullet points or even scripts (don’t even get me started on the fact that many are just babbled into a cell phone), there’s nowhere for talent to polish ad-libbing skills
• And the biggest reason of all why so few local announcers can ad-lib their way out of a paper bag: there are so few local announcers. Sure, the talent on your station is ad-libbing away day and night—from studios in New York or L.A. But not in your town.

Why does ad-libbing even matter? As long as the format is tight and your brand is properly presented, who cares? Does it even matter to the average listener?

It sure does. We’re all so bombarded with packaged sales messages that anything original, spontaneous, fresh and interesting explodes off the dial. Everything else is just blah-blah-blah.

The early guys got it right.

Could your announcers manage this?

When Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as President in 1925, it was the first inaugural broadcast by radio. Both CBS and NBC were on hand and an ad-libbing legend was created.

CBS announcer Norman Brokenshire decided to take the air earlier than scheduled to steal a march on NBC’s Graham McNamee and informed New York of this on his broadcast line. Trouble was, that line was owned by AT&T, which also owned NBC! Needless to say, everything Brokenshire or his engineer (that was the entire CBS crew) said, whether on the air or not, was monitored by someone at NBC. So NBC decided to get the jump and begin its coverage early. When CBS discovered that plan, it simply began its broadcast—with no further notice to Brokenshire. Three hours early.

Fortunately, Brokenshire had done his prep beforehand, was armed with trivia of all kinds—AND had a wonderful ability to ad-lib. For three hours, he spoke “live” on network radio, with only the engineer to ride gain. He described the gathering crowd, the weather, what Washington had looked like the previous evening, the talk in the hotel lobby that morning, what the local newspapers were saying, the Marine Band, the little skull cap that Supreme Court Chief Justice William Taft, himself a former president, wore. He spoke of all things Coolidge and kept going right up until the inauguration began. Three hours of intelligent, interesting commentary. By himself.

How about this?

General manager Bernice Judis—the first powerful woman in radio management, GM of New York’s legendary WNEW in the 1930’s and 40’s—had the habit of auditioning prospective announcers personally. She would put each hopeful in a studio, give him a pencil and ask him to describe that pencil for as long as he could. Martin Block supposedly went twenty straight minutes describing his pencil in fascinating detail. He got the job.

Would you DARE try this?

Advertisers who really trust top talent to get their messages across effectively will sometimes provide a cheat sheet of phrases, selling hits or bullet points instead of scripts. The idea is that the talent then ad-libs the spot, working in all the important highlights in his/her own style to create a potent selling message. One of the best I ever heard at this was Steve Cannon of WCCO, Minneapolis-St. Paul, who did it for three hours every day and was always sold out.

Three Easy Ways To Improve Your Talent’s Ad-Libbing Skills

Even if you don’t come from programming, here’s how you can dramatically increase your talent’s ability to ad-lib intelligently:

1.  Let it happen. Your listeners, advertisers and the PPM won’t mind if your announcers make brief, interesting remarks instead of reading canned lines. Come on...this is radio.

2.  Create ad-libbing exercises and have everyone practice as much as possible. Use Bernice Judis’ pencil trick or something like it. Do NOT permit the utterance of a single “Uh”! I guarantee, your announcers want to ad-lib and will work to improve their skills. If they won’t do that, you have a serious hiring issue!

3.  Make remotes sizzle. Don’t just sign the contract, collect the dough and send someone to an event with a cell phone. Plan, prepare, coach (or provide coaching). Meet with talent beforehand and  spitball ways to ad-lib a meaningful broadcast segment instead of just another call-in.

Hey, if the play-by-play guy on your AM is the only person on the staff who can ad-lib, crank it up a few notches. Now more than ever, radio needs to “pop”. Quality ad-libbing skills are how to make that happen.