All veteran on-air talent understand the value of banking audio. That’s because strategically collecting and storing audio drops from listeners, artists and other guests, gives them a treasure trove of files they can later use to add drops to tracked hours, encourage calls on a slow day, or spice up a live liner or recorded promo. Plus, the more years we spend on air the better we get at directing listeners and guests to give us the specific audio we need. 

These same skills can be applied to soliciting and collecting listener, artist and guest generated video content. After all, the smart phone we all carry in our pockets twenty-four-seven has a built-in version of what would be considered a high-end digital video camera just a few years ago. According to Pew Research, 96% of American adults own a cell phone of some kind and 81% own a smart phone. All we have to do is come up with some creative ways to get them to hit that record button and send us some video content. 

Here are a few kinds of listener, guest and artist generated video content that any station could solicit and use. 

Listener generated content ideas: (All of these should be tied to a prize of course) Ask listeners to record themselves doing an album or single review, their opinion on a hot pop culture topic, opinion on a local news story, or simply what they love about station name. Plus, we can easily turn any on-air phone topic into a video submission topic where we solicit it one-day, tease to the pay-off later, collect and edit that video together and share the audio part on-air and video online/social. 

Guest generated content ideas: For starters we can clean up our on air interviews by recording them all to video first, chopping them down and using the meat of the content on air and the longer form as a video for the web and social. Plus, we can have local news makers send us direct video commentary they record (or call them via zoom and record it ourselves) to turn our local on-air news casts into a video to post online. Another easy to create segment is 60 Seconds With, where a local celebrity or an advertiser talks about what they do or how they got into it for sixty seconds. Then we package it with a branded open and close to share online. 

Artist generated content ideas: Before agreeing to any artist related promotion with their label or management we should make sure they commit to record a short video promo we can use on social/web throughout the promotion. We can also hit artists up anytime to record themselves telling a short story behind their new single or a beloved recurrent. Those are great because you can use the audio from it on-air and pair the video of it with their music video as long as it’s sourced and credited. We should also move to doing all of our artist interviews on video first (Zoom for remote interviews) then chop that down for on-air with the longer version offered exclusively online and a short teaser loaded directly to social with a link to see the full video. 

The more video content we collect and post, the easier it gets to convince listeners, artists and guests to send in video. Because just like hearing listener audio on air gets more listeners to call in and participate, more people are likely to contribute video if they see others doing it. Then, overtime we’ll collect a large bank of video we’re free to use however we’d like in our own video ads and promos. 

If you’d like help soliciting, producing or packaging video content email me at andy@radiostationconsultant.com.

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