CPR Promotional Check-Up - Mar 16, 2012

Pimp Dad's Car

First, prom is going to fall on just a couple of nights in your town. And every limo within 500 miles WILL be booked. To even have one on lock-down puts you at an enormous advantage in terms of leveraging the teens. You'll be able to get them to do anything to win it.

FRED-FM gave away a convertible Corvette for a highschool student to use for the night. Thus enabling them to say "FRED-FM's Topless Prom".

I took Gretchen Allen to prom in my dad's Ford Matador. (Think "the rental car from 'Planes, Trains And Automobiles") Which explains a lot of why that evening was a horrible disappointment in all departments. What if you teamed up with a detailer, a car electronics client, maybe an auto upholsterer and help trick out some kids' dads' car? So he can arrive, if not in style, with a minimum of embarrassment.

The Casting Couch

If you have a furniture store that needs an event for their remote, I heard this done on a station in Ontario. Guys sat on a couch and cast weighted lines at a bucket. First in won the couch.

First Pitch

Teams are back in Spring Training. First pitch in a couple 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.)

Street Team

NOW is the time to be bulking up on your interns for the Summer. Goal? Start with 25 minimum. You'll lose 5 immediately. Another 5 around the 4th and you'll limp into Labor Day with four good ones left. Saga in Des Moines is shooting for 30. That's great. Whoever has the most bodies wins. Mary K, new PD extraordinaire at Jamz in Birmingham uses the Monday street-team meeting to grill them on what they're finding for the station to hit in the papers and on other station websites. It's an assignment to research the streets and search for the ops to be at. SMART idea.

The Peep Olympics

It's nice to see a station NOT miss the opportunity to acknowledge Easter using those gross marshmallow "peeps" candies. This is from WIOG in Saginaw where, in 2006, following a torch run and urine test, the first annual Peep Olympics unfolded. This is from Pinky, the morning show producer.

Challenge One - The Heat Is On

Peeps 1,2, and 3 all go into the microwave I brought into the studio. We set it on a swivel chair, how safe huh?...We had caller 10 guess which will peep will explode first. Instead of exploding as anticipated, they melt and catch fire. We spent the next 2 hours smelling like Smores and fanning smoke into the hall without looking too suspicious.

Challenge Two - The Swim

Pink Peep and Yellow Peep go into the toilet bowl in the community ladies room. This had to be done in between "users" and the male intern shooting video had to stay very still. Caller 10 guesses which peep will go down first post flush. We wanted to have a winner so we played until a caller guessed right. 3 rounds and 6 flushed peeps later the toilet stoped working as well as it should. We got confused looks as the intern and I exit the bathroom together smelling like campfire and looking quite guilty.

Challenge Three - The Peep Show

Each member of the show stuffed as many peeps as they could into their mouth. Then they recited a line from a movie and the caller had to guess the movie it was from. Very funny, and lots of gagging, which makes for some good audio.

KZIA did this with Heather the Morning Show Producer last year. Nothing says a million hits on youtube like some woman with her faced stuffed with that awful candy, singing hits.

More Fun With Real Rabbits

Speaking of Peeps, Q in Memphis has a group of listeners each select a color Peep, a promo person puts them out on the road and the last one to get hit by a car wins a prize for its listener. The Peep 500.