Labor Day in Minnesota signals the end of summer and the onset of snow drifts. Kids here dread it because it means school is back in session. Everyone here goes through some angst about all the things they wanted to do but never got to during the warm weather.
It goes without saying that you’ll have tickets for shows this fall and beyond, so why not extend the summer with a warranty? As long as we say it’s summer, it is, and all of our summer ticket giveaways will continue. How powerful is your station? You can make summer longer.
I’ve written three books on marketing, and The Encyclopedia of Radio Promotions has literally 1,000 sellable ideas in it, broken down by categories like “Beer” and “Pizza” (but not “Beer and Pizza” because that would be gluttonous) and Hallmark Holidays like Halloween and Valentine’s. The book is $99. Email me at [email protected] and I’ll send you the file.
And now on with the Dumpage:
Yow! It’s Hot In The Hot Tub!
“James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub” is one of the better series of sketches in SNL’s long, illustrious history. This little memory cookie got jogged loose today by a client requesting suggestions on how to give away a hot tub that a client is ponying up. Bigger than a contest? A hot tub that you can bring to all your events.
Rentable, mobile hot tubs are out there. For mentions? What if that was your “thing” as a jock? Every remote you have, you do it from your hot tub. The Essence of Promotions is to stand out. With every station in town having a van. If you had a hot tub, that would qualify as standing out.
Two-Year Colleges
I got a promo request from one of the stations looking for something for a two-year college that specializes in career education like dental assistants and accounting, and cooking. This is the third such request in a week, and judging by what’s being run as spots on daytime TV, these people have money. It’s got to be a Continuity nightmare. Every other spot seems to be for bartending schools or chef colleges or computer skills schools.
So…
- What if you created a scholarship fund at the client and awarded tuition to either a vet or to one of their children?
- A couple of the stations (Mix in Boise and KZIA in Cedar Rapids have regular morning show bits where the team or a co-host will try a new thing, like skydiving. The college is all about new things, so a sponsorship of the bit would make sense.
- Have kids write in and tell why their recently divorced/widowed moms need the help and how she always supported them, and now the kid would like to give a little something back.
- What if the morning show submitted a curriculum and taught a one-day class? It could be on broadcasting, comedy, writing, pretty much anything they were passionate about. The tuition or class fees from everyone who signs up could go to a scholarship fund.
- Post-9/11, when tourism to Hawaii and Vegas plummeted, and there were big layoffs in the hospitality industry, Pink Slip Parties were big. Show that you were laid off and get free appetizers or free movie tickets or some other entertainment cost paid for. These kinds of clients could not only sponsor but could also recruit students at these things.
- There are always “Best Of…” issues in the local free papers. What if you were to do one on the website and make sure to highlight many of the careers and professions taught at the client?
- The best spot for a radio station or morning show ever? Was done for a cost of $150…which covered rental of a straitjacket for Mancow. The actual production was done by a video production class at Monterey Peninsula Junior College. What if you had the students create and produce a TV spot for your station? Have a debut party with them. And buy time so that it runs one time. (Obviously more would be better, but I’m just being realistic). They then get copies of it and have something for their resume: they produced a spot that ran on TV.
Booking Photo Beauty Pageant
Dave Ryan at KDWB did a contest where you had to match photos of his listeners to crimes that they’d been locked up for. I think the threshold was that you needed to spend at least one night in the joint. It was actually pretty funny. I failed miserably.
A friend/coworker regularly goes through the overnight booking photos on the local paper’s website, picks out hot women, and then sends them out to his database to pick the hottest felon of the previous 24 hours. They’re in the public domain, so it passed his Legal Dept. litmus test.
There’s a weekly feature potential here.
Free Juice
You can overthink prizing. At things like fairs and fests, people want to charge their phones. So, 93Q in Syracuse has made phone charging part of their set-up at the New York State Fair.
Also, please note karaoke. Karaoke will always build a crowd at your booth. Crowds are good. If I walk past a station booth and there’s no line, it makes me wonder what’s wrong with them.
Santafy
One of the stations has some great tickets in December, and obviously December is FILLED with themes and elements to play with. They’ve had really good luck with “listen for this song” as a cue. They don’t play Christmas music, so it’s going to be themed as songs ripped from Santa’s personal playlist.
Advent Calendars
These are great, under-utilized promotional methodologies for the holidays. One station will have a different prize every day in December, and this could be one way to make the reveal.
You could also do Match Game with an Advent calendar template.
Chill Or Thrill
KINK in Portland has been having listeners pick what concerts they want to go and see down in Bend. One of the stations has a variety of vacation trips to award in September? What if you imaged them as Chill or Thrill trips? Chill would be a week on the beach in Florida. Thrill could be seeing U2 in Vegas or a ski trip to Colorado.
AI Film Festival
Movies are universal entertainment. Radio have always done a great job of partnering with screenings and finding other ways to acknowledge hot films, like myTalk once did with the Barbie debut when they rebranded for the weekend or their annual Cat Film Fest after a St. Paul Saints game.
Halloween is coming up. Maybe do a Scary Movie Bracket.
Virgin Radio in Vancouver did an annual Fake Film Fest and REALLY tapped into something. Maybe it’s because of the film industry in that market, but they got great entries. So what if you did an AI Film Fest? Kind of like Write A Song Wednesday, you give the audience ten random elements to incorporate:
- A used car
- A gym teacher
- An exchange student from Brazil
- Food poisoning
- A mysterious knock at the door
- A friendly Golden Retriever named “Buddy”
- A lost pair of World Series tickets
- Being late for school
- A neighbor who keeps all their shades drawn
- A rock next to a tree that doesn’t belong there
They could add their own twists and direction, and all of the entries would be posted and voted on.
“Bug’d”
This was something that originally was going to be called the Mike Hunt at Wired in Philly. For some unknown reason, the GM didn’t like the name and instead of just switching it up, bagged the whole thing altogether.
It’s very simple. You hide a microphone in town. Find it and win. Based only on the ambient audio clues, ie: you pot it up and listen. This is the kind of stuff Radio did when it was fun and didn’t overthink stuff.
There are three ways to pull it off.
Pre-Tape
As done by K-Rock in Charlottetown pre-recorded audio at the sites where the mikes were hidden. I’ve attached their synopsis and a promo. Some good suggestions on how to make $ off this. The general sentiment was that the next time they’d do it with live mikes. I have their recap if you’d like it
Auto-Pick Up Cell Phone
This is how Jamz in Birmingham did it. They presented it as being Kanye’s cell phone that he’d lost when he was in town. They put a cellphone in a plastic Nare-type egg and hid it in the market. They called several times a day, it would answer, and you listened for the sound of traffic, bells, planes, dogs, whatever. And obviously, you encourage people to make noise and then listen to see if they hear themselves, which would obviously indicate they were close to it.
Actual Live Mikes
As done by GCap in the UK. There were multiple “bugs” in the market. This is from the OM:
“Someone was always watching – just used the street team covertly. That was also useful as we had them take pictures that we then blurred, etc. to go in the VIP club online as extra clues…Since we last spoke about Bug’d, I made a change to how we did it to create a bit more pace to the promotion…so last time, I did this, we had the Bug’s live for ‘x’ number of hours/days. So for example, “a new bug has gone live, and it’s worth £10,000…but we only got 72 hours to find it before it self-destructs…” This actually worked much better because we had complete control and weren’t left with just one bug in action and people losing interest.”
Geographically, our TSA is fairly big – it’s over 1 million across the South of Wales, so we had the Bugs in our key postcodes. So not always that close to the station. We did retrieve it each day – we had to anyway to ensure that we had fresh batteries in the radio mic; otherwise, we could have been in all kinds of trouble…
Will It Melt?
In case we get one more heatwave this summer….
Clay with The Wolf in Greensboro called me one morning. He was sitting on the (seemingly) last four pairs of tickets to the next night’s Toby Keith show. The bit we came up with? “Will It Melt?”
During the first break of PM drive, you go to the Sales cubes and steal five items. A bobblehead. A candy heart from Valentine’s. Whatever.
You then take one caller for each item, and they need to say whether it will melt in the next four hours. You take the items, lay them on the sidewalk in front of the station, and report on their status throughout the show. Bobblehead is getting soft but not melting. Candy heart? A puddle.
If the callers were correct, they get the prizes offered.
“Local” Contests
There are so many VT’ed and otherwise chlorinated radio stations that you can listen to for an hour and NOT know what market they’re in. Cities 97 in Minneapolis is the opposite. They ooze “Twin Cities” in everything they do. I have a bunch of other examples from pretty much every company, but to list them would tick other people off. But they’re out there.
A great local promotion is so specific to the market that it would be hard to explain it to someone 100 or 1000 miles away. Excellent example: Pittsburgh. Large, spread-out market with rivers and hills and LOTS of highway and road tunnels.
So…I was trading emails with Y-108 about a promotion opp, and they mentioned Tunnel Tunes. I replied, “What are Tunnel Tunes?” Mark Anderson explained that because of all the tunnels, locals are used to driving and having to miss large chunks of their songs. Thus, a contest where they start a song, it suddenly goes to static, and the designated caller has to finish the lyric.
Simple. Local. And it nails Pittsburgh.
What would it be in your market that is so freaking local that I would have to ask what it is because I’d never seen it on a prep sheet or heard it done by every morning show in a major company?
When An Artist Has A Birthday
That’s always something that you don’t want to slip by, should it coincide with a market stop on their tour. The Jonas Brothers were in DC; it was Joe’s birthday, so Z-104.3 in Baltimore had a card in the foyer that people could sign, and it was then delivered backstage. You really need the payoff shot so that people can see that their messages actually made it to the artist.
When You Have Starbucks Gift Cards Drop In Your Lap
A very wise PD is going to combine them with some gift cards to get Uggs and do Basic Girl Starter Packs. That’s brilliant.
Car Pool Karaoke On Crack
LM Communications was the sponsoring cluster for Pops In The Park in Lexington, Kentucky, with the local orchestra playing the music of Queen. With access to the jumbotron, Kerri Stein and her crew created this amazing piece of cinematography using the mayor, air staff, and clients. This is unbelievable.
The Past & Present Concert Series
I don’t know many people who throw their ticket stubs when they get home from a concert. So, one of the Rock stations gets a ton of concert tickets for contests and wanted to look beyond digital entries and keywords. So…the plan is to announce a past concert, like Van Halen at The Met Center in 1984. The designated caller needs to bring their stub with them when they come to get their tickets.
