CPR Promotional Check-Up - Jan 11, 2012

Still Hope For Terrestrial Radio #327

Radio used to be really good at jumping on every opportunity and exploiting it for it's most. We're largely anti-active now; unless the Society For Children With Droopy Eyes brings us a promotion, we miss it.

Stations in the US...missed Katrina. I've seen stations that missed their local franchises in the Super Bowl!!! I mean, seriously.

You should always have in the back of your mind, "What is the number one topic/issue/story with our listeners/market?" It's a great starting point for building "stuff". Dave Ferguson and Jay Stevens built WPGC on just that theory. No marketing money. No "traditional contesting". Just being uber local.

The A#1 news story in the STATE of Minnesota is a kid named Jack Jablonski who is a highschool hockey player that was paralyzed by a check to his back a week ago. We're almost Canada so highschool hockey is large and this story is literally everywhere. Above the fold in the paper most days. In the first three news stories on TV every night. I went and checked and literally a hundred of my FB friends have changed their profile pics to his number. Someone started a FB "thing" for him and it had 50,000 likes the first day.

Oh...and you can see his school from the studio windows at KDWB.

But yesterday, they were K-Jabs. They did thirteen hours for #13 and sold shirts for a fund because spinal injuries can run into the millions of dollars. Gregg Swedberg, who is OM for the cluster, has a kid at the school From Gregg; I can tell you guys this: inside the BSM community, you guys are the biggest heroes in history.

Go and do cool things in your community. Why? Because you can't beat great local Radio. And congrats to Dave, Steve O, Barb, Lucas and Wazz for seeing an opportunity where other stations might have just seen a news story.

They sold over 600 shirts at $15 a pop, the money going to Jack...and they pulled two TV news stories out of it. THIS is local Radio at it's best.