One of my favorite talents is Laura Daniels with Cumulus Buffalo; she’s always reveled in the most random of topics, whether she’s channeling her inner Michael Phelps or perfecting her FarmersOnly profile. With the help of last week’s historic heat wave, she baked cookies in her car. Radio is at its best when it’s topical. It’s the stuff Spotify could never do.
Let’s get straight to the Dumpage.
Mug, Shots
In a perfect world, there are lots of people sitting in cubicles listening to you for 8-9 hours at a time. And since we’re always looking for different ways to engage and connect with our listeners, what if you had a promotion where listeners send in photos of their coffee mugs? Post one submission a day with a little shout-out to the listener, their workplace, and coworkers. Maybe a client would sponsor and provide a few free cups of their product to the daily winner.
Family Four Packs
I’ve always tried to steer away from what other stations do. To paraphrase Jerry Clifton, “If everyone is doing something, don’t do it, or do it so remarkably that no one can miss it.” And that guiding principle can certainly be applied to Win It Before You Can Buy It and Family Four Packs.
Stations don’t do Family Four Packs because Fred Jacobs did some strategic, demographic-dense study of contesting and proclaimed that all prizes should be done in fours. We do them because the circus gave us 800 circus tickets and WTF are we supposed to do with 800 circus tickets? Frame it as “Fun for the Whole Family.”
God Bless the Silly People
Look at everything as promotional Play-Doh. Everything is an opportunity. Heatwaves suck, but they’re hard to ignore. You can create a fake nude beach and broadcast from there like Wired in Philly. You could do a pet safety PSA like Hot in Ottawa, or you can pay a lucky listener’s AC bills like Live in Portland. You can go and do popsicle runs to outdoor workers like Power in Redding, or give away Super Soakers like The Bull in Seattle.
Redundant Tally Marker
I saw a morning show host, armed with a dry erase board, keep track of their cohost’s repetition of phrases. On Friday, they tracked how many times she said “I hate my life” (five times). It was not meant in a mean-spirited way and was kind of funny. Morning shows are like sitcoms, filled with different characters with different quirks and habits, and you can play around with this during your show’s segments.
A Back-to-School Methodology
An award-winning CHR station has a major back-to-school event in August at a mall. Their client has given them a few $1,000 gift cards to give away. The methodology to give them away? Set up a row of lockers with a few different combinations. If your combo opens up the locker, you get whatever is inside.
Hair! (Not the musical)
Hair is an oft-overlooked promotional opportunity. Which is sad, because it’s pretty universal.
The Summit stations do a day of free haircuts at participating salons, and it blows up. Who doesn’t want a free haircut before heading back to school?
KZIA in Cedar Rapids did DMV Makeovers, set up outside of the license bureau, and fixed folks’ hair before it got immortalized for a decade.
If you need charitable donations and you need them fast, the whole “If we hit our goal, I’ll shave my head” bit is perpetually Gold. Sarah Pepper did this and raised $50,000 for Leukemia research.
Football
One of the stations has a client that came to the table with an eye-watering amount of money and wanted to be tied to that market’s NFL franchise. I told said-PD about the $10K Run Back contest, and they took it to the client and secured the buy.
Very simple: it’s an insured contest, sponsored by the client. You do NOT want to do RTW at their locations. 99% of the time, it’s not someone who has ever even heard of your station who gets picked.
Every week, a winner gets tickets to the home game that Sunday, and if the home team runs the first kickoff back for a touchdown, they win $10K.
