WHY THE TED WILLIAMS STORY ISN'T GREAT FOR RADIO

All the rage over the past week, aside from flocks of birds dropping dead in mid-air all over the planet, was the discovery of the golden-voiced homeless ex-drug addict, Ted Williams. Hey, we all love a good comeback story and I wish Mr. Williams well, but there's a bit of hint at what's wrong with radio in the tale.

Ted's homeless. He's a recovering drug addict. A panhandler. With an incredible voice. You know the story. He was discovered and now he's getting more jobs offered to him than Clear Channel eliminates in a month! The Cleveland Cavaliers, NFL Films, The Ohio Credit Union League, MTV, ESPN, WBNS-TV and a yet unnamed Pennsylvania radio station have reportedly expressed interest.

Now, assuming Mr. Williams can master inflection at all, even in a listen and repeat mode, he can have a fine voiceover career (if he can keep the demons and lack of personal responsibility that wrecked his life in the first place in check). And I hope and pray that that unnamed Pennsylvania radio station is seeking him for just that purpose - voiceovers. Record a few sweepers to run between records. But I fear they have other plans for our story's hero.

As our beloved medium has regrettably devolved from "must listen" radio stations with an attitude and personality all their own to music delivery commodities, the heart, the passion, the uniqueness of radio communication - one on one between the radio personality and his or her listener, has become nothing more than slick positioning statements and marketing messages that the sales staff couldn't fit into the stopsets. It's no wonder we don't connect with listeners anymore. Who can relate to a silver-tongued liner jock with nothing to say?

Far too often, any personality has been banished to the morning show, if not banished altogether. The edge, the attitude, the personalities that made this business - gone! Today's over-researched radio "product" is as bland and boring as every other product that has ever set out to be "safe". (There's nothing safe about playing it safe, I always say.). A wall-to-wall barrage of well-testing songs with the call letters inserted between each one, with innocuous jocks who think they're "doing radio" reciting :10 second liners from a script their PD wrote as they go into the stopsets. You can listen all day and not fine anything wrong with it, but you can't find anything right with it, either.

I wish Ted Williams well, but unless he has a unique personality to go with that golden voice, I hope he sticks to the voiceover business, and I hope the radio industry has the good sense to realize that a great voice, while a valid tool in any air personality's toolbox, is among the least important tools they have.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

It occurs to me the greatest challenges to success my stations faced during my programming career were usually internal, not external.

Free pronunciation tip: the 't' in "often" is silent. The word is pronounced "off-en". Please inform TV's various talking heads.

Some people can be counted on to fall in line lockstep, and others can be counted on to think. I prefer the latter.

Personal branding in the social networking age - You can only be known for one thing. So what do you want to be known for?

I wonder, inundated with marketing as we are, how much money you'd spend if you purchased everything you were marketed in a 24-hour period

Sometimes, there's something to be said for saying nothing at all.

I once heard one of the Masters commentators on ESPN, in a failed attempt at southern imagery, say "sit on the porch & sip an azalea". Don't fake it if you don't know it.

Dove for Men. Right! Good-luck with that

Clearly smart and stupid aren't opposites. I'm increasingly surprised at how many people I know that demonstrate both traits.

Great radio stations stand for & against certain things. Mediocre radio stations are mere commodities.

I know many wise men. I know many arrogant men. I don't know any arrogant wise men.

Indecision is the worst decision

Originality is the art of concealing your source

Perhaps we never put ourselves in more imminent danger than when safety becomes our only priority and pursuit

If we all wore personal "classic rock" t-shirts, mine would be tie-dyed, not black. How about you?

Intrusiveness is dead! Interaction, on their terms, is everything

it occurs to me that there is nothing safe about playing it safe.

TALKING IN TECHNICOLOR

Television has always cited it's obvious advantage over radio - pictures. You can watch it, give it your undivided attention, a full color electronic medium. How could you ever do radio in technicolor?

Early in my on-air career, I had a Program Director who was a great mentor and talent coach. The late Paul Franklin, then of Z103 in Beaufort/Atlantic Beach, NC made his mark on me early on, and when I began my own programming career a few years later, I passed on a lot of the wisdom he shared with me about effectively communicating and generating a

repoire with your listener - essentially the difference between being a disc jockey and a personality.

Oh, there were extensive lessons on show prep - not just telling me to do it (which all programmers do) but actual

ly teaching me how to do it (a novel approach that should be obvious but somehow isn't). Concepts like working in top-of-mind and local references became staples of my approach (and the dread of every young air talent I would later critique). But another concept he stressed was talking in "word pictures".

Word Pictures, quite simply, are visual phrases. It's the difference between saying "I got in my car and drove down the road" and "I crouched down behind the wheel of my lime green '74 Pinto and bravely pulled out into afternoon rush hour on Sunset Boulevard." Get the picture?

Now, the theory behind word pictures came from someone Paul had worked with at 94Z in Raleigh. I forget the gentleman's name but he was a deep thinker, the kind who ponders things and comes to realizations. He had concluded that people think in pictures and, therefore, related to pictures in a way that they didn't relate to words. So if you spoke in word pictures, people could visualize what you were saying - helping you cut through the clutter of a subconscious medium.

For years, I repeated this theory as fact. But I'm kind of a thinker, too. And I started to realize something. I can't speak for everyone, but I most definitely do not think in pictures. I think in words - then I create the pictures to illuminate my words. I suspect everyone does, but I don't know. But that didn't damage my belief in word pictures. Far from it.

See, I still realized that the word pictures definitely cut through and stuck with you. They did stimulate another sense. Instead of just being words that you heard, these phrases encouraged you to create a very specific accompanying visual. (By the way, radio friends, this is the power of the spoken word, not of pictures and video - so it's our strength! Imagine the images we can create on a budget of zero!).

Well, since I realized we were just using words to stimulate the memory of another sense (yeah, the memory - I know what a lime green pinto looks like and I've seen afternoon traffic on Sunset Blvd., but we weren't actually seeing either when I used that phrase earlier) it dawned on me that we have five senses! I can hear things, I can see things, I can feel things, I can taste things, and I can smell things. But if the spoken word is powerful enough to conjure up vivid images (from your past experiences) then words could probably be used to fire up the sensation of the other senses, as well.

Hmmm, as I sit here writing this an hour from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, my mind drifts to the sandy beaches and hot, summer afternoons navigated between the beach umbrellas and bikini-clad sunbathers, and I can smell the salt air coming off the ocean. Don't you feel the hot sand between your toes, scalding, actually, until you make your way into the cool, frothing Atlantic surf? And when we meet up at the cottage afterwards and fire up the charcoal grill, throw some fresh, succulent jumbo shrimp over the coals until they're hot, with just a trace of grill marks, then dip them in melted butter before popping them in your mouth, well...

Get the picture? With a little effort and some planning, you can become an on-air communicator that taps into the full sensual repertoire of your listener. Let your competitors continue to be a music-dispensing commodity dwelling in the background. Burst through the subconcious, connect with your listener on an emotional level, stir their senses, and learn that you can, indeed, talk in technicolor!