WDCR in 1982 FRONT Row Tracy Hurd, Ron Alexander MIDDLE Row Clare Bracken, Gary Sandy, Jim Secunde BACK Row Peter K. O\’Connell, Scott Rolle, Mike Savino, Unknown (sorry) and Mark Kraus

My longtime friend Ron Alexander is a fun person for many reasons not the least of which is he likes to collect things. He just doesn’t seem to throw anything out! It’s all very organized, mind you, but he seems to keep everything. Like that photo you see up there.

What you’re looking at (besides an embarrassingly silly mustache on the guy in the upper left corner slurping his Pepsi, again) is probably a group of some of the most creative college radio folks there ever were. I don’t mean that in an egotistical, “hey aren’t we great” way!” I mean it in the best possible sense.

I will grant you that my opinion is likely jaded because I was a part of it but really, what the student staff at WDCR (now called Flyer Radio and incredibly higher tech then when I was there) pulled off as regular broadcasters was quite amazing.

BTW, the big deal for the picture was that Gary Sandy (who I want to say was from Dayton) was somehow cajoled to stop by WDCR (now known as “Flyer Radio”)while I think he was still starring on WKRP in Cincinnati. It was big doings at the time.

Anyway, at UD, it worked this way: if you really wanted to work in radio at the University of Dayton, you started at AM-64 WDCR (which was a carrier current station that only broadcast to the dorms and student union). Then you tried to work your way up to WVUD-FM, the University-owned 50,000 watt station that had a full time professional management team (GM, PD, sales, promotion etc.) and gave a few students regular air shifts.

Having the combination of those two opportunities for a radio ho like me was Nirvana. WVUD was the real deal but the creativity and ingenuity that WDCR offered to all of us was almost magical by comparison.

It helps to have had a real promotional talent like Ron Alexander who was the only person who ever got me to dress up like a leprechaun. I think I delivered leprechaun-o-grams or something to student houses and dorm rooms as a fund raisier….but that was the kind of crazy stuff that got the station attention.

Of that group, I still keep in touch with Ron (who was in my wedding), Clare, Tracy, Mark and just caught up with Scott on Facebook (Ron pointed out to me Scott’s got a new show on the History Channel so congrats on that).

Not in that picture are other great folks like John Luttrell, Bill Slamon, Jeff Wagner, Dan Suffoletto, Ginny Judge, Liz Benz, Lisa Curie, Joe Lombardi and more (who I am unforgivably forgetting) who made WDCR an amazing station during my years at UD.

That one picture absolute takes me back to a simpler time where I thought I knew how good I had it. But I now know you can’t know how really good you have it until you take a moment to look back down the road a spell.

That to me is a really special gift.

Tags: commentary, radio, university of dayton, WVUD by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Back in 1985, when I was working at WVUD-FM in Dayton (now WLQT), CBS Radio affiliates were given early access, via network satellite, to “We Are The World” before records (yes records) got mailed to stations. WVUD as a CBS affiliate could download it and as production manager, that’s what I did, running the cart down to the on-air studio so Pat Haverland, our midday guy, could be first to air it in the market; he did and we were.

So the song has always had a special place within me…and (for different reasons) just about everybody else.

I will grant you that 25 years ago and then again this year, the professional singers who participated in the recordings had the best of intentions and indeed turned in fine performances.

But when I saw George Whittam’s facebook posting of this very unique video of a less famous rendition, it made me think that maybe this was how it was supposed to be performed in the first place. Social media done extremely well? What do you think?

Tags: commentary, radio, social media, university of dayton, video, WVUD, youtube by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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We’ve all heard tell and maybe even personally experienced the kindness of strangers in our lives and it often gives us hope for humanity. We usually quickly get over that hope but it was ours for a minute to savor. Kind of like hitting a great golf shot: reality usually sets in on the very next swing but we had that moment.

So finally after months of nit-picking the text to death (I formally requested nit-picking and damn near personally picked the thing to death) I published The Voice Over Entrance Exam yesterday.

Now obviously just posting a web site page isn’t enough to let people know it’s out there, besides, my marketing sensibilities wouldn’t let that happen so I relied on the kindness of weirdoes.

weirdo (weer*doh)
n. pl. weirdos Slang
1. A person regarded as being very strange or eccentric.
2. A deranged, potentially dangerous person.

To be clear, I refer to definition 1 not 2 here. As an example, I am a weirdo as are all my peers in the voice over profession. It’s really one of the qualifications for getting in the business, actually.

I’ve always been terribly fond of almost all my fellow weirdoes but today my appreciation runs deeper than I can articulate.

That won’t stop me from trying to articulate.

Since the book was about the industry and for use by those in the industry or wanting to be in the industry, I went to the industry in my marketing. And since the book was free to download, I used Social Media tools as my primary marketing channels because they too are free.

The following maybe a helpful “how to” guide you can apply to your business when promoting your product or service. Obviously, you’d have to adjust the audience (unless it’s the voice over industry). Also, it helps to have some established credibility with your audience to get more immediate support as outlined herein. It only took me 27 years to establish mine, but your mileage may vary. As always, enjoy the ride.

THE BLOGGERS
Step 1 was to get to the bloggers before the release. It was like a public relations story pitch except not that cheesy cause it was from me. Basically I let all the voice over bloggers know the book was coming out on May 5th, gave them an advanced copy and said offer any comments on the book as they saw fit (or ignore it too if they chose). But my feeling was to respect the primary on-line voices of the voiceover industry by giving them a first glance.

On the day of the book’s release, the reviews began. Ah, symmetry!

As of this writing, regarding The Voice Over Entrance Exam, the mighty Bob Souer (weirdo of the nicest kind and highest order) wrote on his blog: “In my opinion, Peter has written an excellent tool that should be must reading for anyone thinking about trying to do professional voiceover work.” Thanks Bob but now I feel bad because I’ve become required reading and that sounds like homework and I “disliked intensely” (as my Mother would say, she being opposed to the word “hate”) homework!

Over on Joe Szymanski’s blog, he thought “The title is spot on.” Thanks Joe, I kind of thought the title was cool too. It felt perfect when I thought of it and I was surprised as heck it wasn’t out there already. Score one for original thought, I guess.

Russ Renshaw noted with the release of the book that “A very cool and rare thing occurred on the internet today.” He called the book dense by which I think he meant thick and stuffed with knowledge, I think. Now if he had called the author dense there would be no arguing the fact. I sincerely appreciate the pub, in either case, Russ, thank you.

Always supporting the voiceover blog community, Stu Gray’s blog promises a full review of the book and knowing him it will fair and honest…that’s all I could hope for.

And the always prolific James Lorenz noted on his blog that The Voice Over Entrance Exam had “tons of useful facts about what to expect and how to proceed with a career in voiceovers.” Cool!

TWITTER & FACEBOOK
Glide over to Twitter & Facebook for Step 2 where I “teased” at about 9:00 a.m. ET on May 5th “Fun voice over announcement coming up from the Voice Over Workshop at 12:00 p.m today. And the word FREE is involved.” (the time when I had scheduled my web tools to go public with the book download page and media release on the web site news section and blog). While Stephanie Ciccarelli was kind enough to be one of the consultants on my book (and therefore knew what I was “teasing”) I was still gob smacked by her generous tweet that she “Is proud of her pal, Peter O’Connell. You’ll hear more about why today. Awesome! @audioconnell”. Very, very kind!

When I tweeted that afternoon on Twitter and Facebook: “It’s live and seems to be a hit: The Voice Over Entrance Exam…oh and its FREE” the response was totally a surprise. I expected, as with most of my tweets, followers would click the link to see what it was about. That would have been plenty good for me.

As burgeoning Twitter expert Dave Courvoisier (also a consultant on the book) noted in his Twitter-centric May newsletter (also released yesterday), a retweet is praise of the highest order. And I must say in totally honesty I was not expecting the retweets and was truly humbled that these great talents felt strongly enough about the book to share it with their followers. So my thanks to (again) Stephanie Ciccarelli as well as David Houston, Joe Rodriguez, Kara Edwards, Liz de Nesnera, Voices.com, Jamee Perkins, Justin Barrett, Linda Ristig and Terry Daniel via Twitter.

Over on Facebook, Kara Edwards again, who likely used some FriendFeed-like aggregator, offered her retweet garnering a very kind response from Amy Snively. If women liked me this much in high school I might not have ever left! But if I hadn’t left I wouldn’t have met John Luttrell, a respected radio programmer (yes there are still some out there, thank God) and a friend from my WVUD-FM days who sent a nice note via Facebook as well. Erik Sheppard also plugged the book has his daily notice on Facebook.

MEDIA RELEASES
Step 3 would be old school PR with a new media twist of an electronic media release to targeted outlets. It may be a day or before I see/hear any payoff from that activity but again – no tree or postal worker’s back was harmed in the use of this marketing tool (i.e. it was free).

PROFESSIONAL NETWORK
Step 4 would be direct communication to the voice over community that has reached out to me over the years and whose names have grown exponentially in my address book. Now there may be an oops in this one as the link to The Voice Over Entrance Exam web page doesn’t work for some but most I guess just copied and pasted the address in their browser tool bar and the page worked fine. Nice to hear from Caryn Clark, Tom Donahue, Chip Joel, Dan Hurst, Kitzie Stern, Bobbin Beam and Alexis Williams (“I’m so glad you did this book!”).

ON-LINE FORUMS
Step 5 includes communicating to lots of voice talent out there who I either haven’t connected with in real life or via social media. So I made sure to post the media release about The Voice Over Entrance Exam on Rick Party’s Voiceover Universe which in just over a year has taken on a life of its own. My voice over home away from home, D.B. Cooper’s VO-BB has a “Learning” section and I posted a link in there as well.

PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
Step 6 involved uploading or emailing the media release to the web site of the professional association I have memberships with like MCA-I; they have news modules on their sites and some produce paper newsletters and they now have my information. Look, association newsletters and e-zines need content too!

SUMMARY
Was all of the effort worth it? My goal was to make as many people as possible aware of the book so that hopefully they will find it interesting and download it.

On May 4, 2009 I had 24 visitors to my web site.

On May 5 as of this writing I have had 148 visitors to the site and 105 of them went right to The Voice Over Entrance Exam page. So I’m guessing since it’s free, the book has had over 100 downloads on its first day. With all that link love and promotion, the book brand and the audio’connell brand got lots of web time too…the outcome of that has yet to be determined but I’m guessing much good can come from it. Stats for today won’t be up til tomorrow, I think they’ll be good too.

Not a dollar was spent promoting it (except for my time, which does have value) and hopefully lots of people benefited from what I (obviously) think is good information.

My respect for my fellow weirdos grows by the minute. Thank you friends.

Tags: advertising, blogs, commentary, radio, voice actors, voice talent, voices.com, WVUD by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Quite frankly if I were a program director at a radio station, I wouldn’t have hired me in 1982.

I came across some old reel to reels of air checks and production demos from WVUD. The one I have has some technical problems that maybe I can fix but the rest of the world can probably only handle a minute of my God awful jock talk.

I apologize in advance for stealing the next 90 irretrievable seconds from your life to hear a 1985 air check of a 23 year old disc jockey in Dayton, Ohio.

LISTEN:

You have free reign to take me out to the barn in the comment section below, once you stop the bleeding from your ears.

Thanks for reading.

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Tags: announcers, commentary, radio, university of dayton, voice talent, voiceover, WVUD by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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It was 1985 and I was working at WVUD in Dayton.

The previous Christmas, musical artists in the UK under the leadership of (now) Sir Bob Geldof had recorded the incredibly impactful song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The song included a collection of the day’s top artists who donated their time and talent to raise money for the famine in Africa.

It was a singularly amazing combination of musical artistry, song writing and performance.

In January of 1985, at the end of the American Music Awards, scores of artists commuted from the award show to the A&M Studios to record the Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie penned “We Are The World“. It too was singularly amazing.

My recollection of the song is so fresh because as production manager at WVUD, I was tasked with recording the song off of our satellite upon its release and our station debut it in our market. Downloading a song off satellite was hardly an everyday occurrence in 1985. We usually waited for the records to arrive like every other radio station.

On Good Friday, April 5, 1985, at 12 o’clock noon on WVUD and over 8,000 U.S. radio stations, regardless of their format, played “We Are The World” at the same time. For those seven minutes you literally could tune in almost any radio station and hear the same song. It was a shining moment for radio.

There were concerts and fund rasiers and on Good Friday, 2008 – 23 years later, still more famine.

Can’t we use the millions of dollars paid to Paris Hilton to have a TV Show camera follow her around to buy grain for entire regions of starving people? Are our priorities still that askew?

Let’s not forget the hungry while we enjoy our Easter celebrations. We may not think so but someday it really could be us.

Tags: commentary, radio, university of dayton, WVUD by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Two radio stations who were a part of my radio life both made news last week and since I read it in the same file on All Access, I thought I’d mention it here.

In Dayton, Ohio WGTZ-FM the now formerly Z-93 has changed its format from heritage Top 40/Mainstream to it’s a Jack-ish Adult Hits format. Now calling itself “FLY 92.9”.

I worked for four years in the Dayton radio market. WVUD (now WLQT) was an adult hits station when I worked there (it had been AOR for a time before that) known as “Hitradio 100” and later as “Today’s Music, 99.9 FM”. What made WVUD interesting was it was a 50,000 watt station owned at the time (no longer) by the University of Dayton. It was NOT a college station however. The management including the GM, Program Director and sales staff were all long time radio pros. But the on-air staff was students and that’s what sold me on the school. I was on the air there within my freshman year and never looked back.

At the height of our ratings success, a station that had been known as WING-FM (and the calls were really the most memorable thing about the station at that time) turned the wheel and came gunning right for us. Z-93 was balls to the wall top 40 and commercial free for 30 days, knocking WVUD and Hitradio down a notch or two. Licensed to the town of Eaton, Ohio someone came up with a tremendous script for their top of the hour ID: “Z-93, WGTZ-FM. Eaton, Dayton and Springfield…Alive!” Say it out loud with the right inflection and you’ll catch its brilliance. But now after more than 20 years, change has come and Z-93 is no more. Oh and they fired the entire air staff (crappy SOP). It’s not so much about mourning for me now but rather, the memories.

And to prove how much I am outta touch with the local radio market here, WECK-AM was sold by Regent Broadcasting (which bought WECK and a cluster of other station stations previous owned by CBS Radio) to Culver Communications. Culver Communications owns WLVL-AM in Lockport, New York and it’s the only local radio station I ever worked at — for one week.

Yes you read that correctly. I worked there for one week where I summarily quit and was fired at the same time. Why I’d be glad to tell you the story. I got the job to handle the afternoon drive show (which was quite an honor in what was primarily a one stop light town – kidding) and had been training there all week. The pay might have been a bit above minimum wage but I was fresh outta college and oh well.

But at the end of the week, my dear aunt who had been sick died AND my Mother broke her arm – like, within 24 hours. This was going to be a testy week, schedule-wise and I called my program director to explain and ask for some time off. He said no and that I was unprofessional and if I needed time off I didn’t need to show up for work and I advised him that the station’s transmitter might fit slightly snugly up his posterior cavity (or maybe I was nicer but its what I shoulda said and isn’t that one of the nice parts of blogging, to rewrite your history as you so choose?)

But in all sincerity I hold no malice towards the station because life unfolded and I did pretty well for myself and my family. I think it’s terrific that local ownership (a rarity these days) now runs two stations and I am oh so hopeful that Dick Greene (who owned the station when I was there but I never got to meet – I guess he waits until the second week to greet the new folks – good plan) really makes a go of them. WLVL has been doing OK for years – more power to him.

Tags: blogs, commentary, radio, university of dayton, WVUD by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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