This week I sent all my clients pages and pages of Thanksgiving ideas, which, in the real world, is pretty late. If you can be working 90-120 days out, then that increases the chances that you might actually get a package sold.
Cumulus in Albuquerque had a package for the 250th birthday of the United States on the streets in February. Most other clusters stumbled on the fact that it was a pretty big 4th of July, in May. Cumulus monetised it for some serious $$$. That’s always nice.
You should be buried in planning for December. I look at Christmas like it’s a menu at a Chinese restaurant. In a perfect world, you would have three promotions: one from Column A (something for the drive time show), Column B (an event), and Column C (something digital like a bracket of Christmas movies).
Christmas is a Vibe. It’s something you should drape yourself in. And since there are going to be competitors who miss it entirely, it’s way, way too easy to close out the year with some content that you can sell and also be relevant and in the moment with the audience.
And now, on with the Dumpage.
The First Three Weeks Of January
It’s normally a giant vast hole of nothingness for a lot of stations. So if you actually HAD something to come out of New Year’s with, and you could make money off it, you’d be in the upper 2% of all stations. A great event that you could plug in there would be a Daddy/Daughter Dance. It’s been done by several stations, and is an annual thing at Star Country in Roanoke.
Creepy Dolls
My friend Jane has a very valuable heirloom doll that I have to be honest, I’d never be able to sleep in a room where it was: I’d be afraid of waking up, and it would be there with a little chainsaw, revving its motor. And God Bless the Silly People because 93Q in Syracuse turned it into a promotion.
Co-Ghost
A few of you have done the “haunted station” bit for Halloween.
It’s coming to a morning show somewhere where they’re going to have a psychic in for some staged reason, and right off the bat he will start making conversation with someone behind and slightly to the left of the morning guy. Host and co-host are going be like “WTF are you doing?” Psychic says, “You didn’t know about Matt?”
Matt has been in the building since before the station moved in. He’s lost. Not malicious. The morning team starts discussing a few odd things that have happened, like the time they went to the bathroom and got coffee; neither had their fob to get back into the programming side of the building…and yet the songs just kept playing, and there was no technical reason why there shouldn’t have just been dead air.
That kind of stuff. They announce that tomorrow will be Matt’s last show, the psychic comes back, does a cleansing thing, and helps Matt over the threshold. Gary Spivey did this with a guy saying goodbye to his dead fiancée. I knew it was fake, but I was tearing up.
Project Down & Dirty
I truly believe this is event at myTalk 107.1 in the Twin Cities is the best Promotion in Radio. It’s literally a Reality TV show, and that’s a good thing.
Basically, in a finite period, like a week, the four two-host shows create a business or an event. Like learning to cook, creating a menu, and debuting a restaurant. In a week. Or becoming stand-up comics and performing to a sold-out audience at the biggest casino in the state. Or, this year, writing, acting, shooting, and editing four comedic short films.
The thing that makes this a “10,” in my opinion, is that the hundreds of thousands of dollars they’ve raised have been matched by clients and it ALL goes to a consortium of amazing LOCAL charities.
Holiday Jobs
What do people during the holidays often do? They get part-time jobs. One of the stations has a credit union that’s celebrating their 25th anniversary and is all about “25,” including $25 giveaways. So the idea is the old “We’re hiring people to listen to the station”, as in: We play so much music that we can’t even keep track of it. And that’s freaking our bosses. With so many people getting holiday jobs, we’re joining that list. With help from (client) we’re hiring people to track our music. When we blow a work whistle, start writing ‘em down. When we blow the whistle again, call, and we’ll pay you $25 for every artist and title that you can recite back.
Great promotion that always works if you truly dive into the themes that it provides.
A Penny Saved Is A Penny One
Speaking of credit unions, another station has a credit union client that would like to push getting children to start saving for their future. College. Whatever that might be. This was actually a huge program with a local bank in the 1970’s with thousands of kids sticking 25 or 50 cents into a little envelope at school every week.
High/Low is a fantastic on-air contest with a web/social media visual. In Cincinnati, it was done with “beans in a jar” to win spending cash at a casino.
We’re going to combine the two ideas.
- Take a photo of a jar or vase filled with pennies.
- Do an on-air contest that requires you to guess how many pennies are in the jar. You try using “high” or “low” prompts following previous guesses.
- The person who gets the right amount can either keep the pot (say, $27.81) or start an account for their kid.
Name The Topping
You can overthink prizes™. If you give away a pizza, people will try to win it.
WOW Country in Boise did “UFO” or “Unidentified Frozen Object” and presented it as the Office Manager FINALLY got fed up with all of the leftover food left in the freezer, gave the staff a day to collect it or she was going to toss it all.
WAY in the back, broken in a glacier practically, was a Tupperware container with something reddish in it. She thawed it out as much as she could with a hair dryer and posted a pic. Guess what was in it (“rigatoni” or “stuffed peppers”) on Facebook and win a wide of beef from a client. Similar to what KOZE just did with “Guess What’s In The Sami”.
A station has a pizza client that wants something, and they’re pitching the same concept. They’re going to bake something like a stapler or a VHS tape of Beverly Hills Cop or a Clarissa Explains It All Pez dispenser under the top layer of cheese and post the photo for people to guess…to win a pizza.
Football Moms
One of the stations honored a rotating genre of moms every week. This week, it’s “theater moms” who drive the kids to rehearsal, help with the sets, bring snacks, etc. You could do a web or social feature on moms who are active and huge supporters of their kids’ football programs.
Tic Faced
As exciting as key words are, a great philosophizer once asked, “But couldn’t there be a little more?” Like having your Halloween-themed keywords delivered by a Quija Board. “Writing stuff on your face” doesn’t just have to be for Post Malone. You could encourage your listeners to get tic faced and write your keyword on their face, shoot, post, and share.
Downcounts
Most New Year’s Eve countdowns have zero hook and sound exactly the same. Wired in Philly, when they were in the process of beating Q-102 in less than six months, did The Cracked Out Countdown and just jumped around the list. #14 into #28 into #4 into #21. Why? So that they didn’t blend in with the wallpaper. If you feel obligated to do the traditional countdown, then play around with the name.
Also, I worked at a station where one of the talent had a montage of #1 songs from the previous decade, and every year he’d add seven or eight songs to the tape. The contest element was to listen at midnight for this to play and write down every artist and title and enter them for a drawing. Wildly successful.
Cash Or Candy
They are starting in earnest, and since the goal is to get people to actually notice that you’re doing them and maybe actually participate, it should behoove you to dare to have some fun with the name or the imaging or both.
An iHeart station themed it around Halloween with “Win $1000 In Candy Or Cash”. Here is some of the verbiage:
“ARE YOU READY? IS YOUR PANCREAS READY? BECAUSE (STATION) IS ABOUT TO HOOK YOU UP WITH ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS… IN CASH OR CANDY! THINK ABOUT IT – A THOUSAND BUCKS IN KIT KATS, BUTTERFINGER, SNICKERS, MILK DUDS, SWEET TARTS, HELL, A THOUSAND BUCKS CAN GET YOU A LIFETIME SUPPLY OF NECCO WAFERS – IT’S THE SUGAR HIGH YOU NEVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE! AND THE WINNING STARTS MONDAY MORNING AT 6! ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS IN FREE CASH OR CANDY – ON (STATION) VOTED WORST RADIO STATION BY HEALTH FOOD STORES EVERYWHERE.”
Download Your App-etite
The Hubbard stations in the Twin Cities and Seattle stand out in terms of incentivizing people to download their apps.
We are heading into a season of unparalleled gluttony. So if you have pies, or turkeys, or hams, or pretty much any addition to a holiday meal for giveaway, people would probably, finally, heed your requests to download your app.
