The Infinite Dial

NBC recently announced that they were engaging in a bold little experiment with The Office. Basically, to try and juice up viewership for reruns, they are borrowing a little "Web 2.0" and doing a mashup of existing content by marrying two previously seen episodes plus previously unseen deleted scenes into what they are calling "newpeats." In an era where those of us with DVR's rarely miss shows we care about, it is easy to see why re-runs have lost a bit of their charm. After all, I never miss Battlestar Galactica--but I have never watched it on its new home on Sunday Nights, either.

Whether or not this works for NBC, this is a great idea for your morning shows to drive increased web traffic and also provide content for podcasts that are sponsorship-worthy. Putting yesterday's show, or even highlights from the show, up on your website is just the first step. To drive real traffic, you gotta do some work. Here are three quick ideas for "Newpeats" of your morning show:

1. Package up several weeks worth of a popular benchmark (prank calls, for instance, or the "Five O'Clock Funnies") into a monthly "Best Of" podcast ("sponsored by Cingular Wireless, Now Part of the New AT&T," of course!) Lots of listeners tune in to certain shows only to hear certain benchmarks--providing an archive of just that content, packaged up for more convenient listening, is a no-brainer way to extend your brand, increase mindshare and monetize podcasting.


2. Try "Re-Contesting" - if your morning show features a popular trivia show (e.g., "Battle of the Sexes") splice 4 of them together with sponsorship drops after each, then put a new stealth contest at the end of the content requiring listeners to list things named earlier in the podcast to win a new, podcast-only contest. Sell the whole thing to whoever sponsors your current contest feature to mine a little extra revenue, and provide some off-air lovin' to your "contest aficionados."


3. Tell a local story. Every show has its time to "leave deeper footprints" with a given local issue or important news story--why not take just the best, most relevant segments to that story and edit them together into a new piece? If your station spearheaded an effort, for example, to provide support for families of soldiers currently serving in Iraq, you might capture all the best moments of your efforts--the great interviews, the memorable phoners, etc--and memorialize them in one podcast. You could provide a donation link right next to it on your website and talk it up on the air.

Those are three I thought of in the shower--there are loads of variations on this theme. The real take-away is that you have lots of great content that no one ever gets to hear, even with recycling, that could be repackaged both to make it "new" and to acknowledge that people podcast content so they can get the stuff they like, without the stuff they don't, and get it when it is convenient for them. Remixing your content into "newpeats" is a great way to respond to consumer inertia in this regard, extend your "virtual TSL" and open up new sponsorship opportunities.