“At last, a radio station that fits your lifestyle.”
That’s what I heard on the radio today.
What?!
“At last…!” Have you ever heard a real person talk this way about a radio station?
And what exactly is a “radio station that fits your lifestyle”? What is it about your lifestyle that seems so impossibly matched to any existing station, let alone this particular one?
What does this phrase even mean, anyway? What is the point of it?
No wonder listeners despise radio’s idle chit-chat. We seem to veer out of our way to waste the audience’s time and interrupt their music with gratuitous and pointless verbal grenades.
And this happens because we want our audience to believe something so badly that we assume just saying it will make it so.
Well it won’t.
If I tell you you’re driving the “car everyone in your household can agree on,” will you believe me? Or will your household decide to make up its own mind?
I think every radio station should do what I call a “B.S. inventory” of the lines and phrases littering their air.
And if a line or phrase is fundamentally vague or pointless or unprovable or reflecting what you wish were true rather than what really is true, then cut it.