Nearly 24 million Americans woke up at 6:00 am on Friday to watch the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton on one of the 11 networks that carried the nuptials.
While there are many aspect of the spectacle people will be talking about, perhaps the most surprising subject will be hats, specifically the so-called fascinators.
If you watched any of the event or the following coverage, you’ve seen the fascinators. Fascinators are the flamboyant colorful hats that many women wore at the ceremony.
Radio needs more fascinators, not the hats we saw at the wedding, but flamboyant attention-getting things that people talk about over and over.
Radio was once a leader in creating fascinators. Often generated on-the-fly by morning personalities, they were the “throw-aways” that unexpectedly gained traction and went viral.
Today radio seems incapable of creating fascinators.
Talk radio still manages to create the occasional ripple, but few music station morning shows create anything memorable or even worth repeating.
Apologists will claim that a local morning show doesn’t have a chance up against Facebook, YouTube, and other Internet sources of viral pop culture.
We believe the opposite is true. These new sources create infinitely more opportunities to create fascinators than during radio’s pre-Internet days.
The unrestrained morning men (yes, most were men) of yesteryear would be having a field day with everything from Rebecca Black to the outfit of Princess Beatrice at the royal wedding.
The real problem is lack of corporate support and the resulting ossification of morning shows. With so many morning people on the beach, the first priority of the still employed morning shows is to stay below corporate radar.
Don’t make waves. Don’t cause problems.
Just keep doing the same one-liner morning show that your boss remembers from the good ol' days, and you might keep your job (even though it might involve a pay-cut).
Without corporate support and rewarding those who try and fail over those who don’t try, radio personality will continue to drift down the pop culture ladder towards irrelevance.
Which group head will step forward and publicly proclaim: More Fascinators!
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