CPR Promotional Check-Up - Feb 6, 2012

Looking 4 Love

Still stuck for something for the morning of the 14th? I've never seen a station do a Valentines Day scavenger hunt. You'd need a big carrot to dangle but what if you lobbed out ten items on Monday and the person who brings in the most before 5 pm that afternoon wins. Like

• A business card from a dating service
• A hickey
• A handwritten original poem that includes the words "creosote" and "uvula"
• A candy heart that says "I Love You"
• A teddybear with a heart on it's stomach
• The bride/groom centerpiece from a wedding cake
• A ticket stub from a date movie (that will be judged)
• A bridesmaid dress
• A tennis racket ("love", get it?)
• A phone number on a bar napkin

Punking The Listeners

Every year or so there will be one of those viral things that ends up getting forwarded to you. Whatever the video is, it usually is long and slow and boring and then suddenly someone/thing jumps up and yells. And you scream. And then forward it to all your friends.

Which was the seed of an idea that I lobbed at some of the clients for Halloween and they parked it deep up in the bleachers in leftfield. Now, in February, it would totally be out of the blue. They would not see it coming. It's fairly simple.

In Rochester at 98PXY, the set up was like this. There was a new producer on the morning show. In the course of just regular banter, one of the hosts mentioned the ghost on the 14th floor. (Their floor) She was like "Yeah, riiiight". So Moose went and brought in three employees who proceeded to tell stories of weird shit they'd experienced in the offices. This spurred several (staged) calls from listeners who had worked in the building back when it was the offices for a different company and one of the men from their department had been in over a weekend doing catch-up work and had died suddenly from natural causes. Almost immediately after that, strange things began happening. They didn't want to say his name since his wife and children were still in the area. He'd been a great guy and they all felt horrible when he died. But it was common knowledge that he was still "around".

This then spurred (seemingly) the idea of "hey, let's get a paranormal investigator in to see if he can talk to the guy or at least get him on video." The Friday before Halloween I was the ghost buster. I talked about the 37 electromagnetic resonance cameras that would be set up. The thermal monitors that would be set up around the floor that weekend. How I'd already done a walk-through and definitely sensed a presence.

I called back on Monday morning and talked about how me and my team were hunkered down in a hotel looking through the over 1900 hours of video that had been shot on the array of cameras. That, because of the DJ and promo team presence over the weekend we were getting lots of false positives but were hoping to pick up a trace of evidence that he's still around.

Tuesday morning I called back. Unbelievable. We found something. I'm forwarding over an mpeg. Now, take a look at the screen. There's a cubical on the left. Stare hard at it. You will see a tiny orb, a dim ball, that will shoot right, then left and then shoot up and out of the frame. Stare intently. You'll only see him for a second. But THAT was a ghost.

The morning show were all aghast (or aghost). They saw it too. "Let's put it on the website!" Which they did and of course it was just a dark, black and white video of an empty office for about 12 seconds and then BAM a guy in a mask pops up and started dancing.

It was great. They got flooded with "I can't believe you got me! I'm sending it to all my friends" e-mails.

Anytime you can get a response, ANY response from the audience, you're doing better then all the other stations in the industry that have slid into just being background music.