By Jon Holiday Owner/Consultant, Radio Consulting Services
Recently I attended a Savannah Bananas game and witnessed a masterclass in pure entertainment. The yellow-jersey chaos wasn’t just a lesson in sports marketing; it was a reminder of a foundational principle of media. The Bananas stripped the boring parts out of a legacy product and let the “show” take over.
That focus on audience energy triggered a sense of déjà vu. I was fortunate enough to learn how to put the “show” into radio from my mentor, Harry Nelson, who absorbed those principles firsthand from Les Garland, one of the greatest promotional minds in media history.
The Savannah Bananas are doing on a baseball diamond what the masters taught us to do on the airwaves. The venue changes, but the showmanship doesn’t.
The Lineage of Audio Theater
Les Garland and Harry Nelson understood that a media brand is never just a utility or background entertainment. It’s a stage. Garland treated promotions not simply as prize giveaways, but as interactive events.
While programming in San Francisco, he created the legendary “Close Encounters” promotion, announcing the station would broadcast dead air so extraterrestrials could use the frequency. Later, he took that showmanship global by co-creating the iconic “I Want My MTV” campaign. Harry was right there with Garland, learning how great promotions generated energy, urgency and participation. He passed that philosophy along to me: true fandom is built when personalities become more than announcers and passive listeners become part of the experience.
Somewhere along the way, radio contesting lost some of that philosophy. There was a time when contests were designed to entertain the entire audience. Games like Secret Sound and song scrambles gave listeners a reason to play along, even if they never entered. Today, much contesting has been reduced to keywords and text-to-win promotions that may generate entries but offer little entertainment for everyone else. Great contesting should be part of the show, not just a way to give away a prize.
Infusing Showbiz Today Without the Old-School Hype
Showmanship doesn’t mean resurrecting the loud, artificial clichés of the past. Today’s audiences can spot manufactured hype instantly. The execution has changed, but the principle hasn’t. Let listeners see the human, behind-the-scenes side of what you’re doing and become part of the process.
The Bananas don’t stop the game for the entertainment; the entertainment is the game. Radio promotions should work the same way, becoming part of the product rather than something bolted onto it. And while great promotions once lived almost entirely through the speaker, today’s best ideas should create visual, shareable moments that move naturally from the studio microphone to a listener’s social feed.
Showmanship isn’t dead, and it isn’t an antique. Whether it’s happening on a baseball diamond or coming through a speaker, the principle Harry taught me remains unchanged: Don’t just deliver a product. Give them a show.
About Radio Consulting Services
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