My first Summer doing this job found me spending the 4th of July at a client in Jacksonville. It was my first time in the market, and temps were in Hiroshima range with a dew point of about 90. It was… moist.
The station had a relationship with the local Pepsi bottler and their storage area had a couple of pallets of the product stacked up. On the morning of the 4th, they filled coolers with pop/soda/whatever you call it where you live, and we headed out to the beaches.
It wasn’t Rocket Science; It was knowing where the audience would be (the beaches) and then finding a low-cost (ice) premise for finding an excuse to be there and market to them.
The station’s vehicles were mobbed. You would have thought that we were giving away $100 bills. It was insane and proved that you can overthink prizes.
We’re heading into a season of extreme temps, and there will be opportunities to win these kinds of hearts and minds. Star in KC did it as Popsicle Drops and went out to where seasonal employees like landscapers and construction workers were sweltering in the heat and cooled them down with frozen treats from Costco. Jamz in Birmingham and 97 Rock in Buffalo have done it as The Construction Crew and it’s killed.
So, as the clock ticks down to summer, what kind of soft drink connections could you exploit for some icy marketing?
And now on with the Dumpage.
Cinco de Imaging
This was something that Eddie Haskell did at ED-FM in Albuquerque. So simple. If you have a monitor that “rolls off the tongue” and possibly has a Spanich language variation, well, there ya go™.
Girls Weekend
Any time you can get women and their friends out recreating and having fun, you will tap into some karma and be their enabler. Wired in Saskatoon did Girls Night Outs where they would send 20 pairs of women to Vegas for about 14 hours overnight, and fly them back at 8a, stinking of booze and contact-Axe. Book clubs. I heard “WINOS” (Women In Need Of Sanity) as a moniker at KKLZ in Las Vegas
Q in Cincinnati did Girlfriend Getaways. Three weeks of trip contesting to send women to see shows and get bling in Vegas, Tampa, or Orlando.
Facejacked
Thanks to Brent Shelton at K-97 in Edmonton for “Face Lift,” a potentially more family-friendly name than the one I’d suggested for an artist takeover of a listener’s social media page.
Big Freaking Ballpark Organs
Baseball is back. Yea! I love baseball even though it’s usually difficult to be a Twins fan.
A few years ago, one of the Newcap stations got the rink organist and his mighty Wurlitzer from the local Major Junior league team to do his rendition of some classic rock songs. They then had the listeners identify the songs for prizes. It was actually pretty simple.
Not so simple is going to be Seventh Winning Stretch by a Hot AC station on the East Coast, where the MLB team’s organist is going to do some tunes from that format.
Never Before Friday
Long before there were bucket lists, Kate McGwire at WOW Country in Boise would do Kate University and once a month go out and do something that she’d never done before, like, say, celebrating a birthday at Chuck E. Cheese. She’d be joined by a group of listeners who had also never experienced the thrill of having a giant rat serve you pizza. KU even had its own crest.
This could be done monthly as a Never Before Friday. Tommy Chuck has never before seen The Exorcist so he’s getting a copy from Red Box and watching it in the conference room. If you haven’t seen it, now would be the time to do it. And even if you have, in fact, gone to McDonald’s, there will be listeners who haven’t, so it’s a good premise for some Hang (Out) Time.
Roofs Of The Rich And Famous
I lobbed this out a couple of weeks ago, and an AE “somewhere” went and sold it to a roofing client. Post a different celebrity roof every day and ID the house and celeb to win whatever tickets are sitting around.
Summer Umbrellas
The purpose of having an umbrella is to tie everything together. Helps you own the position. Like the 10,000 Tickets thing if you have a lot of concerts coming through. A station to remain nameless has waterpark passes, tubing passes, and other aquatic prizes. Lots of them. So it’ll be “The Summer That Makes You Wet”.
Five And Drive
Kind of similar but done for a car, is a promotion that Chuck Benfer created when he was at Fly 92.3 in Albany. Answer five not-necessarily Googleable questions and win a car. From Chuck:
We’ve had very good success with the Five to Drive Contest. We’ve grown TSL and Share with the contest and improved the weakest hour of our AM Drive.
We came up with 5 difficult questions. The questions have to do with the region and the station’s history. The questions should be paced so that the first one is the easiest, 2 or 3 and 5 are the toughest. We do not reveal question two until question one is correctly answered, and when we read question two, the contestant must get one and two right to move on to question three.
There are blog sites dedicated to the contest where listeners go to share ideas, observations, and guesses. It is very effective. You only play once a day, ours is at 7:00 am with a replay at 6:35 am, so we get a push for the 6 am hour. We play back the contest at 11, 4, and 7, so there’s cross-daypart promo and listening.
Our questions this year were:
Q: What do the following artists have in common: Shontelle, The Goo Goo Dolls, Blondie, and Rihanna?
A: They have all performed at a Fly 92.3’s Summer Jam concert. (This allowed us to promote the upcoming concert on June 4)
Q: You enter between two towers.
A: The Fuze Box nightclub where you enter between two old Tower Records signs.
Q: He plays the best music for your workday.
A: Fly 92.3’s Terry O’Donnell.
Q: He went from the pen to the coop.
A: Mike Tyson (went from jail to a show on cable about pigeon racing)
Q: It’s the 69 between Mr and Miss
A: Beef and Snow Peas (there’s a Chinese restaurant between a Mr. Subb and a Women’s Uniform store, and #69 on their menu is Beef and Snow Peas)
So the results are 6 to 8 weeks of water cooler chatter and promo. The dealer loves it and can’t wait for next spring to do it again.
