Back in 1998 Jerry Clifton, Rick Thomas, and I launched [email protected] in Phoenix. One of the immediate holes in the competition’s armor was that they were non-existent on the streets. If they weren’t paid – like a remote or an appearance – they weren’t there.
Et Voila! We were going to blitz the fairs, fests, concerts, and parades. We auditioned applicants looking for fun, outgoing extroverts. And then I flew home.
A month later I returned, was hanging out with Rick and the subject of the street team came up. We decided to grab some lunch and then peep an event they were at. It was like watching a Fellini film. No one appeared to know what they were doing, one person was sitting in the vehicle on their phone, two were eating, one was smoking and only half were in station gear.
Rick saw red. I mean, he was pissed. He asked the Promotion Director if she’d trained the kids and she said no, “But we gave them a manual.” I might have said, “My experience is that college students in May generally ignore unnecessary reading material.”
And thus was born Street School, which is a two hour bootcamp where we train the seasonal hires.
If you can tell me the name of Jim Rockford’s attorney at [email protected] I will gladly send you my tutorial, but here it is in a nutshell.
- Do it away from the station at some place like a client’s location that you can then use for a bannering exercise.
- Make it fun. The Promotion Coordinator at Mix in KC spent the first 20 minutes outlining all of the fireable offenses at the station and effectively scared the living crap out of the team. He later went to prison for gun violence. No one was stunned.
- Start at the beginning. Ask them “How do radio stations make money?” Because they won’t know and eventually everything we do ties back to money. (Someone will ALWAYS ask, “Don’t we get paid for playing music” and I’ll say, “Not anymore.”)
- We then work through how ratings work because they need to know the value of every meter and diary and that everyone they meet in public could someday be tasked with voting for or against the brand. And if they approach the set up and you’re rude or dismissive or too busy to engage, they will most assuredly remember that.
- Then we move into BASIC customer service, hitting all of the Disney policies hard. How to stand at an event, how to interact at an event, and all of the do’s and don’t’s.
- Next? Event set up and how a booth should look. A table at the back of the booth will bring people in, which is what we want.
- Then we cover how to take photos for client recaps and social media. (Never post a photo of an empty booth.)
- And then, finally we do a bannering exercise that starts one block in either direction and is designed to lead you to the remote. One banner out at the street will insure that people will drive by. We did this at a Jamba Juice appearance in Albuquerque and when it was done the Regional VP for the client came up raving: this was the highest attended Radio remote that she’d had. What was our social media strategy? How many promos and what was the rotation? We replied, “We put up a lot of banners and stood on the curb bullhorning cars….”
If you also like, we can discuss having me Zoom a Street School with your team.
And now on with The Dumpage.
Human Foosball
Sometimes living in Scandia, MN, is like being in the Witness Protection Plan. You’re kind of isolated and your communications are screened. I had never heard of Human Foosball. Someone in the market has to have one of these.
Lepretots
One of the morning shows has a $250 grand prize for “something digital” involving St. Patricks Day. Drawing a green fourleaf clover on your baby’s cheek (along with your music position and ‘brought to you by Anytime Checking Cashing, now in Anoka! Se habla Espanol!’), and posting for a voting contest would be fun.
Or do Lepre-Cons. Same concept but with adults in some greenery, but the caveat is that they have to have served at least one night in jail. One of the CHR’ did something similar a few years ago and the PD, who believes that his audience is Amish, said, “That’s ridiculous! None of our listeners have been in jail! They got over 300 entries.
Back To Back To Back Stage
One of the greatest and easiest contest methodologies for when you have some meet and greets, which are, again, million dollar prizes. So it’s a shame to waste them with “click and register.” Simple. Announce two songs and when they play in any order, that’s the cue to call and win. It will blow up the phones when either or them play and it’s coming back somewhere soon.
Ticket Blast
Probably half the contest methodologies in US radio originated at Power 96.
Cash Blast was billed as the world’s easiest contest: all you had to do was get through on the studio line during a 20 minute period, have the talent answer the phone, and you won $96. They started the contest sweep and after every song they would announce three or four more winners. Over a 20 minute period, they probably took 12 winners. But it SOUNDED like they took 90.
This has been done as Ticket Blast with stations that have a s-ton of tickets to give away and may be coming back somewhere next weekend with rodeo tickets.
Working With What You Got
And in Dallas they’ll occasionally have COLD. So 102.9 NOW-FM did a “Bring The Heat Weekend” with Amazon Firesticks and electric space heaters. Topical > Pretty Much Everything Else.
International Women’s Day
This should be on your radar. It’s this Saturday and every year becomes larger in it’s scope. You don’t HAVE to go and rebrand like the JACK stations in Canada. But it would be cool if you did.
Be ready with some imaging, some social media posts and other ways to acknowledge March 8th. “Great female artists” is assumed.
And since heart disease is the #1 killer of women, this video by Elizabeth Banks could be something to stick in to Facebook and IG rotation.
Spring Fake
One of the stations has some tanning certificates to give away. You could just stick them under “Contests” on your site and have people register to win. But these are good prizes, so maybe there’s something else you could do. Like… Spring Fake. “If you can’t get out of town for Break like everyone else, we’ll help you fake it with a nice tan. Plus, on our site we’ll have lots of photos for you to steal and post so that people will think you’re in Florida or Galveston or Mexico or Vegas.”
Here is some imaging from 98.9 Magic-FM in Colorado Springs from one of their tanning giveaways. (Disregard the file name.)
