Look at you, all cool and smug; yes, we survived the extremely promotional and burdensome holidays. Now we have 3+ weeks before we get the double tap of the Super Bowl and Valentine’s in a six-day period.
“But we don’t have a team in the Game!”
It doesn’t matter unless your team was eliminated in the playoffs, in which case the audience is probably grieving and has no interest in the Bowl. Really, it stopped being about football for most people in the 80’s. It’s about food, the TV spots and the halftime show. It’s also one of the busiest social media nights of the year so make sure you have someone camped out on that.
And now, on with the Dumpage:
Science!
There was a station in BC a few years ago that promoted a new “tone” that had been embedded in their signal that mosquitos found to be annoying. “So just take us with you, play us out and don’t get bit once this Summer”.
Troy McCallum did that with Thermal Audio two years ago at Boom in Toronto. Same concept: the station warmed you while you listened.
More audio like this if you click through.
Happy Flu Year!
A brief perusal of social media over the past week would indicate that a lot of people are down with it (and not in a 1970’s “I’m down with what you’re saying” kind of way).
You can reference it with some Googlizing or with some imaging.
https://soundcloud.com/cprpromo/flulando-countdown-wjhm
https://soundcloud.com/cprpromo/flu-sweep-sealed-011113
https://soundcloud.com/cprpromo/flu-sweep-purell-011113
And this is brilliant and immediately stealable.
Super Crawl
About once a quarter, someone will stumble upon the universal phenomenon of “diaper crawls.” K-Hits in Tulsa owned Easter TV coverage with bunny races. So, you have a party platter or a TV or something for the Super Bowl? Beasley in Philly has done it for the Big Game. The fastest baby wins for the parents.
First Crack at St. Patrick’s Day
What do stations, bars, and people do on St. Patrick’s Day? They do Pub Crawls. A station-to-remain-nameless is going to do a Pub Crawl, Junior Division, 18 months and under. Which of course, will be a diaper crawl at a mall.
Chubby Bunny: First Crack at Easter
First, look at the views. Legal probably would defecate kittens if listeners did this, so have the morning show do it and have the audience vote or otherwise be represented by a different member of the team.
Career Day
It was great in kindergarten, and a station is bringing it back as a weekly feature on the morning show. Why? Because there are some pretty cool careers out there that your listeners probably would love to ask questions about. It’s always amazing the people I get randomly stuck next to on planes, and I love learning about what they do. Like?
- Keifer Sutherland’s nanny
- A member of the Memphis bombsquad
- John Gotti’s freaking DOG GROOMER
- Pilots are fun
- An arson investigator
- A bounty hunter who “discovered” ZZ Top
In Your Face
The $1000 Minute has been huge for Flow-FM in Toronto. A listener has sixty seconds to answer ten questions to win $1000.
The street-level, Cash Cab-ish version for stuff like front row and meet and greets would be to approach random people in malls and grill them on camera. Get all ten and meet the band.
“Today’s Corporate-Required Video of a Dog Playing with A Baby”
Jay Kruz at Mix in Cincinnati had a great line in regard to a station’s seemingly endless litany of horrible celebrity news auto posts: “It’s kids and pets. How difficult is that to understand?”
And he’s right. One of the stations had an eight-day string of auto posts about celebrities. Over 60 posts. And not a single “like”, comment, or share. And then they posted a photo of a dog in a kiddie pool with a toddler. It got three shares, 18 comments, and 51 likes.
Gee. Ya think?
So, what if you created a social media called “Today’s Corporate-Required Video of a Dog Playing With A Baby”? It seems that the company had retained Coleman Research, and after a six-month study of algorithms, patterns, and habits, they established that 39% of all social media posts are about dogs playing with babies, and “They’re making us do one a day.”
Obviously, it’s social media. It’s not bomb disposal. Have some fun. Take a shot. See what happens. I’m sure that whatever you post will get more engagement than “The truth is finally out about Shelley Long’s departure from Cheers!”
New Year/New Career
People do more than pledge to stop or reduce unhealthy behavior every January. Some people make decisions to take different paths in life. That could be a new field of work or education or even starting a new business.
One of the Alpha clusters had some laptops and are doing it as “New Year/New Career”.
KSON in San Diego has done it as “Employment After Deployment” and gave returning service men/women job training, clothes, gas cards…. whatever they would need to seg into a job in civilian life.
Selfie Scavenger Hunts
There are some prizes, like Taylor tickets, where you can really have fun and, here’s the important part, get excited winners and maybe create some talk.
For a past Taylor tour, 103.7 The Q in Birmingham did a Selfie Scavenger Hunt. They posted a long list of things to get your photo taken with a point system based on degrees of difficulty. Nick Saban was 500 points. The person with the highest point score won the tickets.
Similar to the point system in regard to “Live With”. A shot on the evening news was worth 500 points.
#hacktag
If you had hockey tickets or rounds of golf, then all you need to do is create some kind of image and have people share and tag it. Spot random ones to win the opportunity to hack away or watch people get sent to the penalty box for hacking.
Fun Digital Assets
First, did you know you can Simpsonize your morning show?
And if you stick to 9 figures, you can also create your own Hollywood sign.
Gallonstime
A very bright man who knows who he is and doesn’t need accolades heaped on him to justify his incredible aura of self-worth, is going to give out gasoline on Valentine’s as Gallontimes Day. The artwork is amazing. Social media your gallon times that people need to listen to win and give people in love some gas.
Truth Or Pair
One of the morning shows was looking for a contest that they can spike in as tickets have begun to make a reappearance in their market.
Truth Or Pair was done by Mix in Cincy. They took a caller, and they could ask a member of the show anything. If they balked and wouldn’t answer, the caller got the tickets.
Or, have one of the hosts say something about themselves, and a caller has to guess whether they’d actually been an Eagle Scout. As an example.
Arithmetickets
One of the stations has a tax preparer who wants a feature. As exciting as tax tips are, there could be something else.
Arithmetickets would be having the talent tell a story, and the first person to do the math and call, wins. For instance, “Mark invited everyone from the station over for the Super Bowl. He thought ahead and ordered 300 wings from Archie’s Wingapalooza. He noticed that whenever Chris went out to his car, ten wings would mysteriously vanish. So, he ran over to Archie’s at halftime and got another 80. Chris went to his car four times, and there were no wings left at the end of the game. How many wings did his freeloading coworkers eat in his living room?”
And present it as “At (client), we know that crunching numbers is hard, just like crunching wings. So, leave the math to us.”
Axe Your Ex
Destroying old love letters and mementos from failed relationships has been a Radio mainstay for a millennium. Shred. Dump. Shot Through the Heart. So many visual ways to do this. A guy named Chris reminds us that there are places where you can do axe throwing…
He noted that he doesn’t want to make it too creepy, so the way to do that is to have the talent handle the stories. We want to stay away from the really sad stories and focus on the guys who were simply jerks. And the five or six best stories get invited down to hurl axes at pics of their ex. Or mementos.
Genius. Insane. Perfect combination here.