CPR Promotional Check-Up - Apr 13, 2012

Stalking Selena

Among the reasons we don't get as much press as we deserve is that we fail to think visually. Charlie Sheen is losing his mind and talking to whoever will get through to him? 100 stations sent him letters or emails. Wired in Philly pulled a banner over his house and he was on the hotline in five minutes. And they owned the local news for a couple of days.

Lindsay Lohan was in Minneapolis filming a movie? 96.3 did some morning show topics about her. Dave Ryan put up a billboard across the street from where they were shooting the movie. He got two TV stories and a blurb in the Star Tribune.

Brad and Angelina were in Edmonton where he was filming a movie. The competition did an online contest to win tickets to a movie that neither of them were even in. Newcap put a bounty on them. Bring in Brad and get $10,000. Angelina? $15,000. Both? $50,000. And they put up literally thousands of wanted posters all over town. The film almost had to relocate to Calgary.

So Selena Gomez was in Tampa filming a movie. One syndicated morning show and another local but new morning show have not even referenced it. Kramer from Play 98.7 ran these digital boards.

Undorsements

Your audience gets hit with 2500 advertising messages a day and perhaps three sneak through the radar. Marshall Macluhan said "The medium is the message". I understand why stations will stick photos of Justin, Gaga and Katy on a board with "Sunny 108 Plays Today's Hit Music". But it just becomes part of the landscape. Outblur.

Emmis did a TV campaign with Rex Reed, Tiny Tim, the Lennon Sisters and a punk band called Fear where the artists basically talked trash about the station. Or, as Rex Reed dead-panned, "Listening to an hour of Power 106 is just slightly more painful than sitting through the collected works of Cheech & Chong".

When it comes to outdoor, KSFM in Sacto was the first to use people who never in a million years would you want listening to the station, badmouthing it.

Play in Tampa loved the concept and Amanda Allwood got hammered, wrote some copy, they found some graphics, voile'. Zero to Campaign in 10 days.