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| In the spotlight.... |
 Peter Tilden & Buzz KZLA Los Angeles http://www.kzla.com/petertilden/index.aspx Interviewed by Steve Harmon
The Peter Tilden
Morning Show with Buzz has three main players and three other
“underlings” who make up the support staff! Peter Tilden is the
“anchor” and drives the show. When he’s not on the air, he can be
seen often on CMT making his humorous commentary on shows like “Most
Shocking Feuds” and producing television sitcoms and country music
videos. He’s been nominated for a CMA, ACM, and Flame Worthy award
for video of the year with Brad Paisley’s “Celebrity” video. On
the show he plays the more neurotic, no frills family guy. Buzz
provides his own unique perspective as a married father of one. He
plays the guy who is “controlled” by his wife. When he’s not on
the air, he does voice over work. Currently he’s the voice of the
Disney Channel, the syndicated show Maximum Exposure, and FOX’s “This
Week in Baseball”. Ashley Paige provides our female perspective on
the show and also does the traffic. She plays the harried mom who
has to deal with both work life and home life with her husband and two
daughters.
Engineer Marc runs the board, and periodically makes a comment on a topic. Michael is our single “bachelor” producer on the show and provides the “single life” perspective. Phone screener John is the young single college kid providing the “penny pinching” trying to get by perspective. Our demo is 25 to 54 year old females, so the majority of our content tries to stay “topical” and deal with anything in the news with a humorous, slightly female perspective. We have celebrity interviews, phone topics, and bits that come from our daily lives. We are the only country music station in Los Angeles, so we also do a lot of interviews with country artists. Harmon:
How long in your market?
The show has been in the Los Angeles market for four years now.
The show was assembled from scratch. Peter came from a talk radio
background, with stints at 97.1 FM and 790 KABC in the LA market.
Buzz worked on a previous morning show here at Country 93-9 KZLA.
Ashley was recently added a year ago. Harmon:
Give an example of a day you "owned the market".
The day after Arnold Shwarzenegger announced his candidacy for Governor,
we were all over this! We have a voice guy who does a dead on
“Arnold” voice, so we checked in with him all morning long, fed him a
lot of absurd lines. A lot of people actually thought it was
Arnold….we had him say mean things about the current governor, and that
he was primarily doing this to increase his movie marketability!
We also found a tape of his 1970’s documentary he was in called “Pumping
Iron”. The film shows him getting ready and competing for Mr.
Universe. We pulled a lot of clips of him talking about how great
he was and how great his body is, and all of his grunting and groaning
in the gym. He’s also smoking a big fatty in the film! No
one else in the market had access to the tape because it was obscure and
we called every video shop that had it and rented them out! We
also had our “Arnold” call the governor himself (Gray Davis) and have a
lengthy conversation with him, explaining how he wanted a “clean” race
with no mud slinging, but yet he kept making slightly mean off-handed
comments. Harmon:
How do you use the internet in marketing your show?
We use the station website to put up audio clips or movie clips from
interviews we do on the show. We also use the website to deal with
contests that we may be doing that involve posting pictures or listener
polls.
Our biggest challenge is competing in a market where the country music
format is looked down upon. We really are the only morning show
that takes a clean “family friendly” approach and still does more of a
“show” and less music. There are a couple of other shows on AC stations,
but they play more music. So we would say the biggest challenge
for us is to get people to listen to the show despite the stigma of
country music in this market.
We know it was a good show when all of us “connected” with each other in
the room and with the listeners, when the show seemed like it was only
an hour as opposed to the 4 hours. Also, we usually know we had a
good show when we get a lot of unsolicited emails during and after the
show, giving us responses and feedback about the topics and bits we did
on the air that morning. We did a bit where you let a girl who’s dating a guy at the moment ask
that guy’s ex-girlfriends questions…each day of the week she gets to talk
to another one of his ex-girlfriends! Harmon: "When the room's tense we break it by": When the room feels tense we break it by throwing the football around
the studio … we try to put the bad interview or bit behind us and move
on…usually someone makes a joke, we laugh, and move on. previous spotlight shows:
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