CPR Promotional Check-Up - Feb 21, 2012

First Pitch

Teams are back in Spring Training. First pitch in about five weeks. IF baseball is big in your market, then...

• Home Opener is always a bacchanalia of live TV coverage outside. "But we're not the official station" is such a lame excuse. Rambo it. Determine a premise or excuse to be down there. KUBE in Seattle always goes and, A.: buys a parking lot and does free parking with people who have station stickers on their cars, and B.: hangs their biggest concert banner off a parking deck that overlooks all the action.
• Have a backwards-ticking clock on the website that counts down to the first pitch.
• Logoed eye charts are great to hand out out front. Just placards the audience can hold up whenever the ump blows a call. The back has the name of a client on it AND can be couponed, and the eye chart spells out in gradually diminishing sized letters, your positioning statement.
• Any time you can get on the air and say "Join us at (pre-party) and grab (morning guys') peanuts" is just plain funny. (It's a garter toss for tickets but using a bag of peanuts.

Free Door. Down.

I worked at a station where we had an autograph wall. If an artist rolled in, we'd give him/her/them Sharpies and got them to tag the wall. It was one of those things that we didn't even think that much about. Just to show you how desensitized we became to our gigs and the perks that ensued. But if there were listeners or clients at the station, they'd stop and linger, mesmerized, trying to ID all the scribbling and signatures.

Tommy Chuck, when he was at WQEN in Birmingham did an extremely cool "lunch with a band" promotion that allowed families of local troops who are deployed in Iraq, to join 3 Doors Down in a "secret location" to meet, greet and eat. Borrowing their name to spur an idea, Tommy's station got a door, painted it and logoed it, had the band sign it, and then set it up at the arena for people to register for as they entered the show. People listened the next day and if they heard their name, could call in and win the door. Simple. And really memorable. You know whoever won this thing is going to keep it in their rec room forever.