Did you spend this past weekend paying attention to the news coming out of the Marvel presentation in Hall H? Is San Diego Comic-Con a subject that dominates your Twitter feed this time each year?
By now, no one in our industry, in our format even, should be caught off-guard by just how much the guy that lives and dies with his fantasy football team also cares about who will play Reed Richards in the Fantastic 4 movie. The world isn’t divided into jocks and nerds anymore, and Marvel has developed a reputation for delivering more quality than garbage.
That is why I was a little surprised by what I saw come across my timeline on Saturday night.
Marvel has kind of been wandering the wilderness in the last couple of years. Ever since Spider-Man: Far From Home concluded the Infinity Saga, it hasn’t really seemed like the company knows what its next over-arching story will be. Each of the MCU’s phases has ended with a major team-up event, but it turns out that phase 4, which began with Black Widow in July of 2021, will end with more of a whimper than a bang.
How does this relate to sports radio exactly? Well, it isn’t so much about the way phase 4 will end. The lesson is in what phase 4 was.
Kevin Feige, the boss at Marvel Studios, revealed that the focus of phases 5 & 6 will be the multiple universes that were introduced in phase 4. In total, phase 4 was composed of fifteen entries – seven movies and eight TV shows. The multi-verse played a role in six of them.
So, what exactly were we doing with the other 60% of those titles?
This is the lesson for sports radio: know the story you are telling or the point you are making. Everything you do and every point you make should be in service of the larger idea. If they aren’t, they are wasting time and weakening your content.
As a fan of the MCU, I am actually not super jazzed about the multi-verse, and I enjoyed titles like Moon Knight, Shang Chi, and Falcon & the Winter Soldier where the idea just never came up. After Saturday night’s presentation though, I am left wondering why those movies and shows even existed. No matter how good they were, they end up not really being in service of anything we’re building.
Where are you starting your segments? How much dicking around are you doing coming out of a break? Are you hitting your listener with your overall point as quickly as you can or are you building to it, like the twist in a great mystery?
No matter what the truth is, as a viewer, I will think of Marvel’s phase 4 as the company trying to figure out where it was going. There was no obvious goal presented out of the gate and not enough pillars along the way to remind me what matters.
Starting a segment strong is the best way to ensure a strong finish. It is the road map that tells your listeners they can trust that you have a real plan. Come out of the gate with the thesis of the argument you are going to make and present your evidence and points along the way.
No matter what Kevin Feige or any Marvel apologists may say about phase 4, I will always believe the studio went in without a plan of how it wanted to follow up Avengers: End Game. We got a few stories about multiple universes, but we got just as many stories about magic and about humans versus celestial beings. The audience couldn’t latch onto any particular throughline.
Don’t do that to your audience.
Let’s put sports radio in the context of the MCU. Think of your segment as an individual phase. Each minute is a movie or TV show. How much would 60% irrelevancy derail you?
Imagine teasing a segment on why the Jazz should hold onto Donovan Mitchell until someone meets their full asking price. Now imagine you come back from the break and use nearly seven of the eleven minutes in the segment to talk about college football realignment. Do you think any listener would walk away feeling like they got the content they were looking forward to?
Naturally entertaining conversationalists matter in radio. People that can make others pay attention are literally the bedrock of all entertainment, but those people need taskmasters. They need someone that knows the end goal and is making sure their team is constantly moving in that direction.
It really does feel like Marvel has been missing that for phase 4. Take a lesson from that company’s mistake so you do not have to make the same one yourself.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
Amen Demetri. Exactly right.
Aww shucks, thanks buddy!