(By Paige Nienaber) The last couple of weeks have been a complete and total nut crunch(™) for this industry. I have friends and clients at companies where “We’re not waiting for the other shoe to drop” (exact quote) and if that’s your situation, God bless your fortune. Revel in it. Enjoy the luxuries and freedoms that come with it. But don’t be snooty.
What could you do this holiday season? Every day reach out to one person on the casualty list and see how they’re doing. You might be reaching out at a time when they really need it.
Radio is like a spouse. It’s so intertwined in our lives that it has that kind of presence. I feel like I’ve been married to someone for four decades who is very ill and the doctors are recommending repeated amputations to get her back on her stumps again. It’s awful. We all get it.
I can’t think of an industry except porn that has more mental health sufferers. Depression is everywhere in Radio and then you add all of “this” to the mix and there’s too much pain to go around it seems.
So, look past your own pain and reach out to people who have been caught up in the cuts. You might be the right call at the right time.
And now on with the Dumpage:
Staff Holiday Parties
It would be fun to have the morning show learn how to be bartenders because they have been tasked with ‘tending at the station party and their coworkers are angry drunks so they REALLY don’t want to screw it up. Elizabethany at Hot in DC took a stab at mixing. Booze mixing.
Next Wednesday
It feels like everyone has a game plan for next Thursday night through Friday morning, but you definitely want Wednesday morning to be all-Thanksgiving. If you can get a turkey to give away, you can have serious fun. If you have weird food to test on the salespeople, cool. Topics don’t suck. Here are some from Tammy at KSON:
“We have a produced jingle for ‘Tales from the Thanksgiving Table’ and callers share embarrassing or horrible experiences at Thanksgiving. Eg: ‘Uncle Bob got drunk and threw up, etc.'”
“‘What’s stuffed in John’s Mouth?’ He eats a certain Thanksgiving food and has to describe it with his mouth full.”
“’What’s in your Thanksgiving meal?’ Have a child read the ingredients on stove top stuffing etc. really good when they try to read preservatives and can’t
Or…
What if you a video that characterizes the 8 relatives who could show up for dinner:
- Pothead nephew
- Wasted aunt
- Racist grandparent
- Hot cousin
- Uncle who has been sober for three months and wants to chronicle his journey
- Aunt who found God
- Cousin who you have serious dirt on and you can play like a fiddle
- Niece who is part of a multi-level marketing program and needs three more licensed distributors so that she can go to the regional awards in Harrisburg
Turk Out
If you’re in the US, you should be in full Thanksgiving mode pretty soon. Mix in Canton is “flipping the bird” on the morning show and giving away a fully prepared spread ‘o food from a grocery store and qualifying people with turkeys.
You can overthink prizing: right now, in the US, a turkey is the best prize you could give away.
And here is an oldie but goodie from Big Dave at B-105 in Cincy.
The Dollar Bill Game
Revisiting the giant vast hole known as January, one filler would be the Dollar Bill Game.
A station in Boise is doing it with a specially marked bill worth $1,000.
This doesn’t suck but if you really want to turn the market upside down, get it sponsored by a bank and do it as an insured contest.
- Find a bill that has your dial position, in any order, in the serial number. If you were at ‘QEN in Birmingham, it would be a 1, a 0, a 3, and a 7.
- Go out and put it in circulation. Get a video of your spending it at a fast food place. One station left it on the ground next to an escalator at a mall and then shot video of a woman picking it up and walking away. Everyone in town was trying to figure out who it was.
- Wait 24 hours and announce the contest.
- Tell people to collect every $1 bill that has those numbers in it.
- To win on the air, tickets, or whatever over the next couple of weeks, you need to have one of these bills when you pick up your prize.
- After a period of time determined by the insurance company (usually a few weeks), reveal the full serial number and if you have it, you have 24 hours to bring it in and get your reward.
In San Antonio, an accounting firm shared an Excel sheet so people could record and save all their serial numbers. In Miami, it was sponsored by a bank, and people who had accounts there could bring in their paychecks and get it in $1s. And when Michael O’Shea was running KUBE in Seattle, they got a $95,000 winner. (The insurance company promptly changed the rules to make it more difficult for the next station to do it.)
A Turkey Toss
At 93.1 The Wolf in Greensboro, they’ve discovered a creative way to pick winners for free turkeys. From Annie Owens:
We designate which member of the morning show will throw that day, and send them into the parking lot with our 20lb frozen Turkey. They are connected to Comrex on their phone and we get a listener on the phone in the studio (so everyone can hear one another and speak), the listener guesses how many parking spaces the host will throw the turkey – then we toss that bird across the parking lot and see how far it goes!
They guess correctly, they win (they always win):
Black Friday
Everyone seems to have vehicle attacks planned. Which is good. Don’t get caught up on
“we have to give people stuff.” Be down there. Play to the cameras. Hand out pizza if you can get it. But shoot and hashtag the crap out of it AND GET CALL-INS. It’s 3 in the morning. Stop thinking like a radio person. In PPM markets, blast music at the lines all night.
From the digital person at a very large West Coast station: “Social-media-wise, I’ll be focusing a lot on traffic. At this point, with Google Maps and the new fancy road signs ODOT installed, people are going to be more interested in WHAT caused the traffic jam vs how long it’ll be to get to their destination. So, I’ll do my best to keep peeps updated there.”
W(in) T(urkeys) F(ree)
God bless the Silly People at Hot 104.5 in Knoxville.
Thermal Audio
Listen to the radio and heat your home or car? Science!
Elf For A Night
This came up in a social media thing yesterday regarding Christmas parades and how to decorate the vehicles, staff costuming, etc.
WIVK in Knoxville is the sponsor of that community’s parade. When I was there, they were bulking up their footprint by enlisting winners to march with them and they tapped into some kind of Halloween Geek Frenzy. People REALLY got into and poured a ton of energy and effort into their costumes.
For the average person, being IN a parade is an experience. Experiences are good and in this case, free.
Paige Nienaber insults/consults more than 100 radio stations on Fun ‘N Games (Marketing & Promotions). Find him at CPR Promotions. Read Paige’s Radio Ink archives here.
