“The Bob & Tom Show” recently hosted “Q95 Live Jingle Day” on its flagship station, Q95 Indianapolis. The show created custom jingles that were performed live in the studio during the show for 12 Indianapolis businesses.
The show aimed to blend humor, music and community spirit in a one-of-a-kind celebration.
I caught up with Tom Griswold to discuss the concept and its execution.
“We’ve done it before a couple of times. The idea is to shake it up a little bit and add a sense of the liveness of live radio, if that makes any sense. In other words, everything has gotten so sort of canned, it’s nice to be doing something where very clearly you’re doing it live.”
“You’ve got musicians in the studio, you’ve got singers, and mistakes and all, but people, I think, get drawn into it a little bit. It’s really fun because we have the clients all here, so they’re watching it happen. That’s sort of the idea, just again, adding that live factor.”
Griswold has firsthand experience in seeing the power of advertisers’ jingles.
“I’ll give you an example, my nine-year-old daughter, we were in the car, and a commercial came on for O’Reilly Auto Parts. They have a really good jingle, and at the end of the jingle, there’s sort of a short little, ow, sound. Unprompted, she’s singing along with it, and I think there’s a lot to be said for a really good jingle.”
Here is a jingle created on Live Jingle Day for Bee Windows.
The work to execute such a live event begins several weeks out.
“The idea of this was that we wrote original jingles for each one of the 12 clients. We spent some time the month prior writing different types of jingles. We had essentially three different groups doing it, so we have sort of three distinct feels for them. Even within each group, there was a different feel for each jingle. I think it made it fun for the audience and the clients.”
Leon Williamson, Market President for iHeartMedia Indianapolis, said, “‘Q95 Live Jingle Day’ brought the energy of live radio to life. ‘The Bob & Tom Show’ created custom jingles, performed live for 12 Indianapolis businesses, blending humor, music, and community spirit in a one of a one-of-a-kind celebration.”
One of the businesses shared, “Having our jingle made live by the ‘Bob & Tom Show’ crew was unforgettable.”
Griswold believes that having the clients in and letting them look behind the curtain adds to the sparkle of the event.
“I think they really like it. The other aspect of it is you bring the clients into the building, and it’s just something that a lot of them never get to see, especially post-COVID.”
“To come into this building, you can walk through here, and you see the history of the stuff that has happened. Old logos, old signed albums on the walls, and then you see the posters from a variety of shows that we’ve done. We have impressive stuff hanging on the walls, jerseys from famous players in the world of sports, that sort of thing.”
“So getting the clients in the building is interesting, plus then actually seeing something happening live, when you see an actual band up there, you see singers, it’s a kind of a party atmosphere, even though it might be six in the morning.”
The team of musicians for the jingles included:
The Duke Tumatoe Trio
Duke Tumatoe… guitar and vocals
Bill Ritter …. bass
Dawson Willette… drums
Michael Read… Keyboards and Vocals
Annie Manly… Vocals
Amie Eisenmann… Vocals
Pat Godwin … Guitar and Vocals
After the show, the clients are free to use the jingles and collateral in future campaigns. Griswold said that they might re-record some of them.
“We’re going to re-record some of them, probably, but they were all really good. There’s a real variety, we had a couple of session singers that we use a lot, and then our two other artists, Duke Tumatoe, and Michael Reed, are distinguished in the world of music, and they both sang some of them.”
“Pat Godwin from our show sang some of them, and some of them were really silly, and some of them were really slick. Some of them were very jingle-ish, some kind of old school, but some of them are really goofy.”
Will the show do this again?
“Absolutely. I’m already planning it. I’ve got a really interesting idea for the next one.”
“It’s in the early phase, but we’re going to do it in a different town. I think we’re considering doing it in Louisville, Lexington, Toledo, or somewhere else. The idea would be to do one jingle all morning long, maybe two. We would write different lyrics for each client, so the listener would have the privilege of hearing the same melody and seeing how we mixed it up.”
“We could change the tempo, we could change who’s singing it, and then all the words could be different. It’s also possible we might go with two different melodies, and then you could pick one for each, possibly with different instrumentation. There are ways to make it really fun, such as having a tuba band or a mariachi band for an hour, to mix it up. I’m not sure I haven’t thought it through, but I bet it’d be kind of a fun challenge.”
While I had Griswold, I wanted to find out about the latest offering from the show, “Bob & Tom Plus.”
“The idea there is to take the show and release it in pieces, so that if somebody wants to play music, they could play a section of our show, play a couple of songs, or play whatever they want to play. Then they pick it up where it left off, and they don’t have to be constrained by the current clock, which has three six-minute breaks an hour. If they wanted to have shorter commercial breaks, they could do that.”
“It’s just a way of recognizing that there are different needs for different types of shows. This way, we get rid of that clock that’s sort of constraining.”
The segments are fed to affiliates in near real time.
“They are fed as we go. If you’re in the same time zone we’re in, the first hour is cut from the previous day. They’re generic enough that it doesn’t matter. And then the parts are fed as they happen. With a minimum of editing. It’s done on the fly. The guy who does it’s already left, and we’ve been off the air for 25 minutes.”
Griswold sees the show as a good opportunity for stations with small staffs looking to get great content.
“The nature of the way things are right now with voice tracking, etc., this is just going to make it for certain stations, a lot easier to do it. And it’s good for us in that we can ideally get on some more places.”
This led us to a conversation about the possibility of revitalizing content for AM stations that are struggling to stay afloat.
“I think also it opens up to possibly going on to some AM talk stations, we reference Classic Rock, but we also reference occasionally almost all the other genres out there. There’s a certain sensibility that isn’t just Classic Rock on our show.”
“We don’t talk about music that much. But yeah, I think that especially AM radio is in a transitional state right now. You’ve got some sports talk, a lot of political talk, which we don’t do at all. It might be a refreshing way to take an AM radio station and add something a little bit different.”
In closing, Griswold gave a shout-out to his team.
“I mentioned the fact that we have this giant staff. About eight of us are on the air. It’s kind of a platoon situation. We’ve got a lot of young folks behind the scenes and on the air now. My son, Willie, is on the air with us a lot. And we have a lot of younger comedians on.”
“We’re really doing a lot to keep the show fresh and vital for people of all ages. Our streaming numbers indicate that we’re doing well with some of the younger demographics. Although I hate to talk in those terms.”
“I think it’s important to emphasize the size of what we do. The morning we did that, the live commercial thing, let me just think for a second. We had one, two, three, four, and five musicians, and then two extra singers who were full-time singers. And then four people doing voiceovers, plus clients doing voiceovers. It was a big crowd, plus our regular staff. And I should mention this.”
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Jeff Lynn serves as Editor of Barrett Media’s Music Radio coverage. Prior to joining Barrett Media, Jeff spent time programming in Milwaukee, Omaha, Cleveland, Des Moines, and Madison for multiple radio groups, including iHeartMedia, Townsquare Media, NRG Media, and Entercom (now Audacy). He also worked as a Country Format Editor for All Access until the outlet shut down in August 2023.
To get in touch with Jeff by email, reach him at Jeff@BarrettMedia.com.
