What if the Team from Shark Week Produced Your Radio Station?

Shark Week hit my radar several years ago. It wasn’t because I enjoy being visually frightened – which is a draw for some of the audience. Nor was it because of a fascination with all things watery. It caught my attention because it is a ratings phenomenon driven by a passionate and loyal audience. Since that’s obviously what we in radio are also searching for, I got to wondering, “What if the team from Shark Week produced your radio station?”

Here are three things that could happen.

#1- There would be Ample Promotional Material and Plenty of Lead Time to Roll it Out

Discovery starts its Shark Week promotions roughly two months out with in-channel ads, heavy social media promotion, and more. At one point last year, Shark Week was the top-ranked TV show based on ad impressions (over 220 million).

There would be special sponsor/partner promotions to increase reach and frequency as well as revenue. Discovery hauls in an estimated $50 million in ad revenue but their Shark Week merch adds roughly another $10-million.

If the team from Shark Week produced your station, creating anticipation would be paramount.

Social media would play a significant role in the process.

Streaming videos would be rolled out to heighten interest.

There would be a vision that goes beyond just a linear audience. Ways to broaden the station’s footprint and revenue via content, promotion, and execution would always be under development with a sales-friendly launch date well in advance of the content’s premiere.

And oh yes, creative would be over the top (see an example from last year here and a “provocative” spot for 2020 here).

#2 – Familiar Content Would Receive New Twists

Here’s pretty much what Shark Week has to work with: sharks, water, cages, cameras, more sharks, and some crazy humans. Yet the team manages to mash them up in ways that make the familiar fascinatingly new and addictive.

The camera angles change – literally with new locations and technology, and figuratively with new storylines and investigations. Besides the on-air “regulars” behaving as their names suggest, there’s a parade of celebrities often doing “hold my beer” challenges.

At your station, Shark Week producers would likely inventory what you have to work with and combine them in new ways. Possibilities include:

1 – Something the talent is good at/famous for turned sideways to produce something unexpected and original

2 – One or more “anchor benchmarks” for each show to draw attention, create FOMO, and be readily recalled

F3 – or the same reasons, naming as an art form would be given a new, high priority. “Eat, Prey, Chum;” need I say more?

#3 – You’d have an Elevated “Binge-Factor”

Recycling from one show to the next contributes significantly to Shark Week’s overall ratings. Research reveals that a high number of viewers who watched one show also watched another on the same night. Although a smaller number, day-to-day viewership played a ratings role as well. First-day-to-last-day recycling stats suggest “diehard fans [were] eager to tune in at both the start and the end of the week.”

Here are four components of binge-worthy content that Shark Week producers might use at your station.

1 – Know the whole story you want to tell before you start telling any part of it. This makes it easy to structure the roll-out where one storyline leads to the next. At the same time, when you take a holistic view of the project, it’s easier to see areas that need to be trimmed or expanded on.

2 – Create interest with original, open-ended, and unusual/unexpected questions. “How do you two men and a woman live in a tour bus for four months as they travel from concert to concert?”

3 – Shows promote each other in ways unique to their individual personalities.

4 – There would be cliffhangers. Yes. They still work.

Something to Sink Your Teeth Into

Want listeners to react like Shark Week’s fin-atics?

You might start by asking, “What if the team from Shark Week produced my radio station?”

Related: A Finny Thing Happened on the Way to the Marketing and Promotions Meeting (How to Make Your Station Part of Shark Week)

Shark Week airs on the Discovery Network, Sunday, August 9 through Sunday, August 16, and features more than 20 hours of programming.

Photo by Alex Steyn on Unsplash

© 2020, Mike O’Malley, O’Malley Media Group, LLC