The holidays are approaching and many stations will wrestle with how to program around vacation and PTO days. Maintaining a consistent sound, even when personalities are on vacation, is a key to retaining listeners, but questions arise when primary personalities cannot be live for their normal show. That’s why a well-produced Best Of Show is by far the best choice. However, you have to do it right!

Don’t Displace Other Personalities: Moving primary personalities to another time slot is tempting, but it doesn’t work. If the morning show is off, don’t move the afternoon person to mornings. Many programmers think it’s best to be live, but that’s not the case. It’s best to be consistent. Imagine turning on your favorite television talk show one night. The primary personality is on vacation, and another talent is on live. What do you do? You tune out and move on because it doesn’t meet your expectations. It has nothing to do with the quality of content or the hosts. It’s just different, and different programming always results in lost quarter-hours. In addition, the personality moving to mornings is in a new environment and trying to perform someone else’s show. They never sound comfortable! After a week (or two), it starts to improve, just in time for everything to return to normal.

Be Careful With External Solutions: It’s usually a bad idea to bring in a substitute personality from outside the station to fill the role of a missing cast member. Their timing is off, the show is different, and it can reflect poorly on the brand. Research proves that importing talent rarely provides a boost.  Listeners don’t “get” it, no matter how good the fill-in show is. An exception might be for news and sports talk that relies on current news events. Or if the personality is a high-profile talent that attracts a broader audience. For example, a major local athlete filling in as co-host on a sports talk station or Lizzo on a CHR station can get Lizzo for a week, which could be a real coup!

Team Shows: Some programmers with team shows want to maintain a live presence in some form at all times. Each personality takes separate vacations, and the remaining personalities carry on as best they can. From a rating perspective, this is a good solution. The show sounds mostly consistent, and it is live. However, this approach disrupts the entire vacation season. When a piece is missing, the show is off, at least a little. At least, it should. If the show doesn’t skip a beat when a member is away, it may need to be re-cast. Still, this can work if the show has at least three members and the missing character is a cohost. It’s a different story when a primary host is away. The absence of the lead character changes the show’s sound, especially if the remaining personalities lack hosting skills.

The best practice is to recycle evergreen content and keep the show sounding familiar. Here’s how.

Best Of Programming

I used to have a running joke with air personalities that the better they became on the air, the less vacation they received because we couldn’t afford for them to be gone! However, stations can sound great, even when talent is on vacation. In fact, managing it properly can actually sound better when they’re off. What? How can that be? Rating data indicates that listenership declines when recorded Best Of Shows are on. Right?

Rule #1: Never call it a Best Of Show. Why would you advertise that it’s a rerun? I’ve never seen an episode of Friends promoted as a repeat! What would be the point? Most of your audience has not heard the audio you’ll be featuring, and even if they recognize one of the segments, you’re choosing the best of the best! They are okay with hearing great content!

There are only two ways most listeners will know if the audio is a repeat:

You tell them: Messages like, “Peppy and Zippy will be back next week. In the meantime, enjoy some of their best moments like this.”

Poorly Chosen/Edited Audio: The audio sounds dated, with references to time or season. It needs to be edited.

Managing The Audio

Shift the Schedules: The program previously heard audio at a different hour or at least a different quarter-hour. Listeners are creatures of habit, so playing a segment that originally aired at 6:15 at 8:30 will be heard as fresh and original.

Match The Season: Program calendar-relevant topics around the same time they originally aired. For example, summer vacation stories work great between June and August but do they make sense in February?

Live Information Elements: Try to provide a live presence for service elements (traffic, weather news updates). Surround it with evergreen recorded content; it will sound like the full show is there.

Tease & Promote: Build teases into Best of Shows. Personalities can record a short promo or tease before each segment to make it sound more immediate.

Be In the Moment: Maintain momentum! There’s no reason to mention a personality is away, but if you talk about it, don’t make it a big deal. That’s like advertising that the show isn’t “normal” and invites listeners to seek other options.

Edit: Edit content to remove dated references (times, dates, events, etc.). Nothing sounds worse than being out of touch with the listener experience.

Fresh Breaks: With some planning, shows can add listener calls to recycled breaks by asking for a response to topics on social media and calling them back for comments. You can also use ringers or voice actors. This adds some production to the vacation schedule and may not be necessary. But for programmers that insist on fresh content, it can be done.

Conclusion

Personalities should enjoy their vacation and use the time away to recharge and come back with new energy. But take steps to ensure the audience continues to enjoy the show while they are away. Ratings, perceptions, and images are still happening, whether you are live or not!

The good news is that sounding great when you’re away is not difficult. Plan, have a system in place, and follow these principles for Best Of Shows. Most listeners will never know you were away!

Pic by JohnStocker for Envato Elements.

Tracy Johnson is a talent coach and programming consultant. He’s the President/CEO of Tracy Johnson Media Group. His book Morning Radio has been described as The Bible of Personality Radio and has been used by personalities worldwide.