(By Paige Nienaber) It’s time to close out the holiday season. The drive time shows are who usually drive the bus on Hallmark Holidays and with so many of them out of town starting this Friday, it means that you need to find other ways to address Christmas in the waning days.
Simply stated, you need to find ways to say “Christmas” to the 25th.
Obviously, imaging would do that. Here are 52 tracks to get you started.
A weekend contest theme. Ask nicely at [email protected] and I’ll hook you up.
Social media posts. Duh. Drop all of the auto-post crap and ask questions about:
- Trees
- Travel
- Relatives
- Shopping
- Memories from Christmases past
- Mall Santas
- Traditions
- Decorations
- Family Photos
- Horrible stocking stuffers
- School pageants
- Die Hard and Mariah
When in doubt lob it out there and let the audience take over.
And of course, Googlize the site and tweak it out with the holiday décor.
Yes, it is Rocket Science. And now on with the Dumpage.
The Thirty-Seven Bits Of Christmas
- Product Testing: It’s not just the Sham Wow, but that little piece of plastic that scrunches and hides bra straps, or the other piece of plastic that makes caulking easy. You can’t turn on the tube without seeing some kind of weird offer. Do a day of putting them to the test so that your listeners won’t waste precious money on crap.
- Giftervention: Everyone knows someone who is mentally challenged when it comes to buying gifts. The phrase “What the Hell was he thinking?” was actually coined by me and my siblings regarding my father’s attempts to gift my mom. Every freaking year. He was well-intentioned. Maybe too much so. Have a listener set up a friend or family member for an ambush and confrontation. Then send them out (with maybe some client gift cards) and a professional shopper (which could be one of the morning show talent) to make sure that this year they don’t screw it up.
- “When I Was A Kid…”: If you go on Flickr, you can find scads© of images from old Sears Wish Book catalogs. That’s what they called the Christmas edition. JC Penney too.
- Dirtiest Holiday Jobs: Not just a topic, but a straight-to-the-web video bit as the morning show exchanges positions for a day.
- Re-Gift It Forward: In a perfect world, this would be trackable on the website. Morning guy gets a plastic watch from “Alvin And The Chipmunks 3D” that came in a Burger King kid’s meal. He trades it to a listener for a logoed Coors Light bottle opener. Listener trades it… you get the idea. See how far it goes and what people get.
- Morning Show Christmas Pageant: For all the listeners who didn’t get chosen to be in the school’s production…finally…sweet revenge. And the audience will be way larger than the crowded masses in the gym. Write up a quick play about holidays at your station. Throw in some “standards” and you’re set.
- Santa Idol: A talent competition in-studio between mall Santas.
- Merry Matrimony: You know what no station has ever done? Marry Santa. You could either find a mall Santa in a long relationship and you ambush his girlfriend at work. Or you bring in “Mr. and Mrs. Claus” to renew their vows on the air. Surrounded by elves.
- Single Mom Seeks Santa: I think this was a Crystal Bernard/Steve Guttenberg movie. But I digress. From Shane Collins: “What if a station hosted a single mom’s ‘Santa’s workshop’ where moms could bring those ‘hard to put together’ toys and single guys could help them put them together so on Christmas morning they’re already assembled for the kids?” Does two things – it helps out single moms and allows single moms to meet single guys who are cool with them having kids.
- Scroogiest Boss Contest: It’s not a “given” that companies throw Christmas parties for their employees. In fact, many don’t. Why not host a Scroogiest Boss contest on the morning show and have people call in with stories about how cheap their employers were? Throw a giant nightclub party for the staff of all these companies. We did this when I was at Wild and it was big. At one company, the boss had used the money designated for a staff party and took his wife to the Bahamas for New Year’s!
- Holiday Party At The Station: Alice in Denver did this. They got a guy who played piano at malls during the shopping season. He set up in the lobby. They had punch, cookies, mistletoe, and a tree. People from downtown buildings could wander over throughout the day to meet the staff, mingle, and register for prizes. On the air, which is all that really matters, it sounded like December 23rd. What a freaking concept.
- Hospital Visits: An oldie but a goodie. Unless you’ve never dressed as Santa and gone to children’s hospitals, you’ll never know how large of a promotion this is. ‘DVD in Detroit did this for Halloween and it was huge.
- Bash Crashing: When I was in Sacramento in December ‘06 no less than four MAJOR events were happening at the hotel. I was just two drinks away from getting the old KSFM receptionist to go crash them as “employees.” (There is SO a bit here.) Katfish and Kornicky from Live 88.5 in Ottawa did Bash Krashers. Here is the explanation: “We crash company parties with a ‘sober ride’ program, $1000 from a shopping centre, and a comedian who does 20-30 minutes of stand-up. We actually help liven up their office parties and get them to listen to us at a set time the next day when we playback some audio (get IDs while you’re there). They really appreciate it and love the sober ride home aspect, too.
- Office Party Etiquette: Just to open up the phones and have listeners regale you with stupid things that they’ve done or witnessed, would be large. Or, head off some of these disasters with 10 Office Party Etiquette Tips.
- Memories Of Christmas Laps: For the month of December, your jock photos in the Bio section of your website should be replaced with old pictures of them as kids on Santa’s lap.
- Unstrung Heroes: Who hasn’t spent an hour sitting on the living room floor, trying to untangle balls of lights from the previous Christmas? This bit would have each member of the morning show bringing their own lights down to the station. Each would have one listener assigned to them and the person who completely untangles all of their jock’s lights first wins.
- Because They’re Just So Damned Cute: Solicit crying baby with Santa pics from listeners. Much like Q-98 did in Fayetteville or any of a thousand other galleries. Q-98 had a family photo session as the prize.
- The Free Pee Tree: You get a big lot full of trees. You walk your dog through the lot and if it marks a tree within five minutes, you win it.
- Knockoff Christmas: From Toby Knapp at Hot 99.5 in DC: “To make fun of the stations doing ‘Pick a Purse’ we sent someone out in NYC to buy the best fakes money could buy and we gave ‘em to you all holiday long. Watches, wallets, Louis, and Dooney – we had ‘em all. And no one would know they were fakes… unless you told ‘em.”
- Pet Photos: Seemingly half of you did Pet Costumes for Halloween. Get a Santa and a photographer and have them in the station one morning for people to bring their pets by. KUBE in Seattle did this at a client’s location.
- Holiday Analysis: Christmas is always a bad time for depression. Be sure to get a therapist on the morning show to discuss the topic and things that people can do to stay “up” during this traditionally tough time of the year.
- Calm For The Holidays: Or, steal a page from Office Space and hypnotize a listener before they travel home.
- Toy Review: Once again, you could use a box store client for this. Get them to bring a load of their toys to the morning show. Also have a bunch of kids, representing both sexes and various age groups, in the studio to try out the toys and review them.
- Settle Down Rusty!!!: Wrong movie. Sorry. But KZIA in Cedar Rapids sent their stunt guy, Water Boy, out to do a Clark Griswold-inspired tree trimming job on listeners’ trees. Never too many lights.
- A Griswold Christmas: A great Engineer is like McGyver. You can go to him/her and say “Here’s what we want to do. Now help us pull it off.” As witnessed by KZIA in Cedar Rapids where they went and turned a listeners’ home into a flashing booming monstrosity. Lights synched to “Nut Rocker.”
- Biggest Gainer: One of the stations has a fitness club that needs a promotion. Very simple. You weigh in on the morning show. Weigh them in again on January 2. The listener who guesses the exact (or closest without going over) amount of weight that the combined show has packed on over the holidays, gets a membership.
- December Fools: Every market has a few households that are historic for stupidly garish light displays. Chris Taylor, now with Flinn in Memphis, did this at Mix in KC. The morning show talked about the newest competitor for “most lights” and “biggest display”. A home in the suburbs where the owner had put up 1.8 million lights, had a pully/cable system that flew a sleigh across the yard every 90 seconds, had a giant castle over 100 feet tall (lit internally) made entirely of 5×5 blocks of ice that were trucked in from northern Michigan, and even a hayride through a snow cave that had elves of all different nationalities singing “It’s A Small World.” They aired lots and lots of “listeners” talking about how they’d gone and how great it was and it was better then Disneyland. It was at the intersection of two streets that didn’t intersect.
- Santa Scared Straight: From Fly 92 in Albany: “We do ‘Santa Scared Straight.’ People email us specific stories about something major their child did that was bad. Then, we have Santa call them just a week before Christmas to warn them to be good or they will get no presents.
- Random Acts Of Holiday Destruction: Back in the day, Invicta FM in Kent did ‘Trash Your Tree For A Nintendo Wii’ The name says it all; destroy your fully decorated tree for a chance to win a Wii.
- The Biggest Name/Card Dropper: Do a contest to see what listeners get a holiday card from “the most famous person” (as judged by the morning show).
- Because You Always Remember Your First Lap: The station in Sacramento used to have a (hot) Sales assistant whose parents wouldn’t let her go and see Santa as a kid. (religious reasons). So, one December, playing Promotion Director at KSFM, I took Heather over to Arden Square and got her on the big guy’s lap. For the first time at the age of 27. Maybe find a bunch of Santa Virgins and take them out for this key experience they somehow missed as a kid.
- Rating The Santa: They did this in the Minneapolis paper a couple of years ago and it was great. They took some children out to various malls and rated the Santas on such criteria as Best Facial Hair and Lap Comfort. Your morning show could do this with the kids of your staff and bring them in on Monday morning to reveal the results of their research.
- The Phlarmy: This was THE hot toy in 2002. At least according to Dave Ryan at KDWB, who played it up like, well, duh: who doesn’t know about this ultimate Christmas toy? And Dave had the last three of them. Local stores were flooded by calls from stressed-out parents who heard the bit and were terrified that they’d missed the boat on this toy.
- Mall Santa Makeovers: This has TV coverage written all over it. Get some stylists and make-up people to do in-studio makeovers for local mall Santas.
- Chimney Races: Dressed as Santa and hauling a sack of presents, listeners would compete to see who could crawl through inverted tubes.
- Sweaters: Scott and Ric at KZIA annually solicit the ugliest sweaters their listeners have received and model them on the website. The station also does an Ugly Sweater event. Kind of like this.
- Reindeer Hunt: Jammin’ in Portland hid a plastic lawn deer and whenever they did a Stocking Stuffer on the air, they gave out a clue. The person who retrieved the deer won a Nintendo Gamecube. Easily could be a morning show bit for a few days.
Did I miss anything? Absolutely. But now you have less of an excuse to fall back on old cliché bits and 40 minutes of rambling conversations about a D-list celeb who has a Twitter feud with another D-list celeb.
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.
