Radio Once Made Listeners Lean In
For decades, radio captured suspense and promoted anticipation. It created attention for a brand’s biggest efforts. Great radio screamed: “Look at us.” This could be a huge Fourth of July concert, a massive promotion, or a powerful morning show benchmark.
America’s greatest stations built suspense around spring and fall book contests and community events. They teased, hinted, and developed curiosity. Listeners returned because they didn’t want to miss what came next.
Along the way, radio abandoned that craft. Some consultants even guided stations to “stay in the moment” and “you can’t change behavior.”
Informing Is Not the Same as Intriguing
Today, too many stations simply inform instead of intrigue. They post instantly on social media, reveal the punch line before the joke, and treat promotions like grocery store announcements. Meanwhile, morning TV shows, streamers, and YouTube creators are mastering the tease — an art radio once owned.
What Television and Streaming Got Right
Consider television. Promotion of a season finale creates genuine intrigue. Long-running shows like The Rookie take to Instagram to announce a renewed Season Nine. The thirty-second preview of Apple TV’s Slow Horses is simply Gary Oldman passing gas and the wretched reaction of other cast members. No plot reveal. No action shots.
Streaming services do the same with trailers and teaser campaigns. Even sports broadcasts spend an entire game promoting what’s coming up later that night. Human psychology is clear: curiosity is magnetic.
Radio used to understand this.
The Lost Art of the Quarter-Hour Tease
Legendary morning shows built massive quarter-hours by teasing a payoff ahead. “In fifteen minutes, you’ll hear what happened when Max accidentally sent the wrong text to his girlfriend.” Listeners stayed through commercials because they were emotionally invested.
Stations once promoted annual concerts and major appearances with genuine theater. A Street Team stop at a county fair felt like an event. Listeners anticipated it all week because the station made it sound larger than life.
Now, too often the promo sounds like an internal memo.
“Join us Saturday from 2 to 4 at Smith’s Furniture.”
That’s information. Not theater.
Emotion Must Come Before Content
Radio has forgotten that it must create emotion before it delivers content.
Even contests have become painfully procedural. Talent blurts every detail immediately — time to listen, caller number, and prize. Gone is the mystery. Zero momentum.
Radio still possesses a powerful weapon: the art of suspenseful storytelling. Great pre-promotion is not deception. It’s storytelling.
Fear Is the Real Enemy
Part of the problem is fear. Programmers worry listeners will leave if they don’t explain everything immediately. Yet with listeners drowning in information, emotional engagement is what cuts through.
We encourage this with clients — vertically through the morning and horizontally throughout the week. Instead of promoting “Tomorrow we interview the mayor,” we create intrigue: “Tomorrow morning, one local leader finally answers the question everybody has been asking.” That’s a lean-in pre-promote.
Morning television producers know audiences crave tension in the narrative. Watch CBS Mornings or The Today Show. During commercials, a “bug” or “crawl” pre-promotes a major interview with a time stamp later that hour. This approach builds quarter-hours consistently.
At one time, morning radio specialized in exactly this. In fact, radio helped invent it. Great morning shows in the 1980s and 1990s perfected structured daily and weekly payoffs. Most big shows kept listeners through their entire commute. Today, stations often give away everything in a single 6 a.m. social media post.
Tactics to Rebuild the Tease
Here are a few tactics for your shows and brands:
- In the morning, pre-promote your largest benchmarks inside commercial breaks within the next quarter hour. Time-stamp the benchmarks and sell with curiosity.
- With a large annual or semi-annual contest, tease the prize first. Then build intrigue around the timing. Retiring seasons of television often promote what happens in the season before even the show runners know the release date.
- For your annual summer or Christmas concert, release one artist appearing — with several more, including the headliner, still to be announced. After paying off with the openers, pre-promote exactly when you’ll reveal the headliners. Have the artist or a local celebrity make that announcement for you.
Suspense Is Still Timeless Currency
Radio must also rediscover the power of suspense in everyday moments. Build excitement around appearances, school visits, and local celebrations the same way sports teams build anticipation for opening day.
Emotional anticipation is still powerful currency. It requires effort, creativity, and showmanship.
The stations that win in the future will be the brands that make listeners feel something exciting is about to happen.
This Friday, my wife Monica will retire after four decades of nursing. She has had a countdown clock on her phone since February. She looks at it more than once a day. That’s emotional anticipation.
Suspense is not old-fashioned.
It’s timeless.
And radio desperately needs it back.
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Kevin Robinson is a passionate award-winning programmer, consultant and coach – with multi-formats success all over the country. He has advised numerous companies including Audacy (formerly Entercom Communications), Beasley Broadcast Group, Westwood One, Midwest Communications, Townsquare Media, Midwest Family Broadcasting Group, EG Media Group, Federated Media, Kensington Media, mediaBrew Communications, Starved Rock Media, and more. He specializes in strategic radio cluster alignment, building lean-forward tactics and talent coaching – legacy and entry-level – personalities.
Known largely as a trusted talent coach, Kevin is the only personality mentor who’s coached three different morning shows on three different brands in the same major market to the #1 position. His efforts have been recognized by The World Wide Radio Summit, Radio & Records, NAB’s Marconi, and he has coached CMA, ACM and Marconi Award-winning talent. He is also in The Zionsville High School Hall of Fame as part of the 2008 inaugural class. Kevin is an Indiana native – living near Zionsville with his wife of 39 years, Monica and can be reached at kevin@robinsonmedia.fm.
