As we close the books on 2025, I have three simple wishes for you and the New Year. These aren’t equated to Plasma Physics, but a couple of simple things that could only benefit your station/s going forward:
- Try a new contest methodology if even for something as seemingly inconsequential as some concert tickets. Maybe it’s High/Low, Match Game, Secret Sound, or an image search on the site. Throw the audience a curveball and do something unexpected.
- Keep your eyes open for “sudden” and local opportunities to respond and do good. A high school teacher who has cancer and the students are planning a fundraiser. A local law enforcement agency is fundraising to buy vests for the K9 team. A family in-crisis. This is the stuff that an iPod could never do, and we really need to stuff trying to out-iPod the iPods.
- We’re so obsessed with holding on to our numbers that the outreach has been neglected. I’d print out “What have we done today to grow the audience?” and post around the station.
I hope you have a great and safe New Year’s Eve. And now, on with the Dumpage.
Super Bowl Bingo
With Super Bowl parties of some shape and size likely in most markets, this is a great game for on-site coverage. Alternatively, you can follow the example of some Connoisseur stations, such as Hallmark Movie Bingo, and have the cards printable or savable from your social media.
Backstage Break-Ins
I still fall back on the JoJo Wright story of us getting lost in the bowels of the Charlotte Coliseum after a NKOTB show, him stealing a Domino’s pizza box out of a dressing room, and giving it away on the air the next night as Joey McIntyre’s pizza box. Mancow had Kitten break into Whoopi Goldberg’s trailer on the set of Sister Act and grab some makeup, which he then auctioned off. In the pop culture/eBay world we exist in, having any celebrity refuse can be a bit or even an ongoing series.
- It could be as simple as this being part of the hazing of a new morning show stunt monkey: they have to get into (artists) dressing room and steal something (documented on their cell phone camera).
- Having a contact on the staff of the arena, like a cleaning or maintenance person, would always be a nice “go-to” resource.
- Or just hit the dumpsters yourselves. We regularly cleaned out KMEL’s trash. They were in a fairly large building. You knew it was their bags by the feel of the cardboard boxes that cassettes and CDs would come in.
Retro Bedroom Walls
If you are a station that is prone to playing music from the 70s and 80s’s OR you are a station where your listeners were teens in the 70s and 80s, why not do a gallery of listener-submitted shots of their old posters and other décor? If you’re like BEN in Philly with their Tiffany show in February or K-Hits in Sacramento with their Summer Rewind show, you could have some fun with the ticket contesting.
Abruary
Radio has done a pretty good job of “hot” submit/post/vote galleries. Hot Moms. Hot Popo (CBS in Phoenix). Office Hotties. Hot Lifeguards (Townsquare in Shreveport when it was GAP).
But we’ve kind of focused on one gender. B-96 in Chicago did Abtober and yes, women sent in photos of their hunky guys for a gallery contest. Isabel from CPR/Vancouver sent in a photo of me.
February has the Super Game and Valentine’s, but this could be a nice off-air NTR thing. There’s no reason not to have six or seven clients on this.
Foodball
With the exception of the markets that have teams in the game, the Super Bowl stopped being about football in about 1983. It’s about food, the halftime entertainment, and the spots.
So, take what Y94 in Fargo did for the Bison and their appearance in the FCS championships and apply to the Super Game. They did food deliveries of Buffalo Wild Wings to house parties during the game.
Conversely, there are a lot of spouses who annually struggle through hosting a dozen of their husbands’ idiot friends for the Game. Awarding cleaning service for the next day would be a helluva prize.
When App-ortunity Knocks
Back when I was 7 or 8 and by far the brightest and most talented of the promo staff at WLOL, the station did a great at-work promotion that had the audience tipping or alerting the station to where they worked and listened. And several times a week me and a talent would pop in, and if they were in fact listening, the whole workplace won food. The oddest entry that I spot-checked was a massage parlor behind a car dealer in Richfield. Yeah…
At KUBE in Seattle, they would pay people off for each preselect that was set to the station on cars that they pulled over that had a sticker.
94/9 in San Diego had a competition between their street teamers to see who could get the most listeners to download the app when they were out at events and in the community.
But I don’t think anyone has been out rewarding people who have the station app on their phone. It could be as simple as the WLOL promotion: let us know where you work, we’ll pop in, check your phone, and you win app-etizers (food) if you have the app.
App Man
By far the best promotion I ever inherited was Cash Man at Kiss 102 in Charlotte. Three times a week, we’d send someone out to approach random people and ask them, “What station do you listen to?” If they replied, “I listen to Kiss 102!” they won $102. All of these were captured on tape, and each one was turned into three winner promos. We trained the audience how to respond if anyone asked them who they listened to, and with the three-promo plan, it sounded like we were doing lots and lots and lots of these.
What if you did this by asking people to see their phone? If they have the app, they win.
It was also an excuse to acknowledge everything that was happening in the market: “The Kiss 102 Cash Man stopped by Friday Night Live and caught Ellen Abernathy…” “The Kiss 102 Cash Man stopped by the Kings Mountain Christmas parade and caught Bob Sweeten…”
Write A Jingle Wednesday
Froggy in Santa Rosa and B-105 in Cincy are a few of the stations that have been fortunate enough to have someone with marginal music skills (Jay Kruz) in the building who could help out with Write a Song Wednesday. Listeners call/comment five elements they’d like included in a song (bacon, Melissa Joan Hart, beer, croquet, and fission) and the musician steps out for an hour and returns with a song.
Rob Zilla with Sunny in San Diego reminded us before Christmas that letting people use your social media to heap kudos and accolades on local businesses would not NOT be a homerun.
So, what if you swapped out “song” for “jingle”? You take a business or even a charity event from the phone lines and write them up a nice jingle that you then share on social media, using your big booming voice and 100,000 friends to support them with a little, hooky, creativity.
Mardi Bras
As we scramble to find things to put on the books for the 1st Q, this is a great campaign that 97.1 ZHT has tied in with in Salt City. It’s a “drive” to collect clothes and hygiene products for women living in shelters
