CPR Promotional Check-Up - Aug 10, 2011

First Crack At Halloween

You’re clients have already moved on and are working on Thanksgiving, so, no, it’s not too early to be working on some of the things that take more time to get done. And sold. Take this and shoot it over to Sales.

Now I’ll Never Be Able To Be A Teen Model! Kiss in Boise pim...had their morning show co-host Michelle Hart model items for a costume store. Nice studio-quality photos that were updated daily.

The Exotic Erotic Ball The Lord God Mother of all club gigs. Understand that every establishment with a liquor license will have an event and they’ll do some kind of costume contest with $100 prize. This crushes them all. Wild in Tampa and KDWB in Minny are a few of the stations that do this.

It’s all about costumes and big cash prizes. The Costume Freaks will go to whatever event has the largest prizes. You get them and the rest of the people will follow. It’s vibe. It’s a makeout room. It’s the human petting zoo. It’s naughty costumes and big prizes. The last one I attended in Sacramento had 8000 people. Granted, taking your regular Monday club gig and calling it Fright Night with 2 for 1 well drinks until 10 and the women drink free...is also large.

Theme Parks Two stations hit with theme park requests on Friday. Both have events for the month of October and were looking for the stations to bring activities, or, anything-other-than-a-prize-wheel to their remotes.

You could do a wedding and call it “Love At First Fright”. TV loves wacky weddings. “Boovivor” would be people living in coffins. “I Kissed A Ghoul” would be a kissing marathon with guys sucking on their significant others’ necks with fake vampire teeth. If they have a maze, have the morning show blindfolded, put in the middle of it and race to get out. The audience votes on-line on who will get out first. They need to be camm’ed for the video payoff.

RIP Seats Lots of stations have concerts at Halloween, just as lots of stations have concerts at Christmas. Some stations have fun and get into the theme of it. Others don’t. When Michael Martin was at Wild 94.9 he reached out and was looking for things to do to dress up their Boo Bomb. And this is what we arrived at.

They had a smaller stage at stage right with two electric chairs on it. To start the show a priest and guards led in two winners, strapped them in, they threw the switch, sparks flew and the show started.

Fangs For The Memories Sell teeth whitening or dental reconstruction surgery to a client.

Trick Or Tweet The Halloween House is something that Power in Miami and KUBE in Seattle have done. You designate a house in each of several key zips as the station “house”. Usually these are the personal residences of people like AE’s and office staff. The first person to knock on the door and ask “Is this the (station) Halloween House?” wins/won $1000. This could easily be sold to a client and clues to the locations tweeted out every ten minutes all afternoon and evening of the 31st.

Pumpkin Drops David Letterman’s career was pretty much based in the early years on throwing stuff off roofs. As representatives of the most immature of the media, I would hope that we don’t consider ourselves “above” smashing an occasional pumpkin.

The best drop ever was at KRTR in Hawaii where they dropped one from a helicopter onto a numbered grid at a festival. The person whose grid got mashed won $1000.

Second best and more realistic was done by Hot in Milwaukee where they sold it to a mall and the client popped for a shopping spree. They got a 400 pound pumpkin and hung it from a crane. You went to the mall, ogled the gourd and entered your guess on how far the farthest piece of pumpkin would fly when it hit the ground. And it didn’t fly. It more flowed a dial position 102 feet.

Crypt Crashing You need food. Beverages. Street teamers and DJ’s in costumes. Saturday the 29th will be the night for people to have house parties. There is no reason you can’t be at a club and also out crashing house parties. It’s apples and oranges. And it sounds great on the air to “send it” from your inevitable club event to the crew who have stopped by the fifth party of the night as you hear partying and other audio accoutrement in the background.

Movie Night Pattie Moreno put this together in Palm Springs on less than a weeks’ notice. Imagine what you could do with over three months to plan? They got a Cineplex and had a different classic horror film on each screen. People came in costume and there was a charitable tie-in.

Movies are the Entertainment Universal. If you did this? It would be large.

Ghost Tours Go to www.theshadowlands.com Every market has something that is allegedly haunted. Get a bus. Get a psychic. Get some local historians. Sell the sponsorship. And take a bunch of winners out for a night of house-hopping.

Virtual Haunted House It goes without saying that this is one of the top three holidays of the year for Googlizing. Several stations have taken pages and created consortiums of every Halloween element they could find. Ghost audio. Pics. Videos. Stories. Links. Costume tips. Look at nightly cable programming; there wouldn’t be five different ghost programs on every night if people weren’t into that stuff.