CPR Promotional Check-Up - Jun 14, 2012

Wedding/Focus Group Crashers

In terms of a morning show topic, wedding crashing is great. At LEAST two or three times a Summer I'm in a hotel where there's a wedding reception. A nice shirt and pants and I've never NOT been able to mingle and score a free drink or two. (It beats reruns of "COPS")

Why do you want to have every member of the Street Team and intern staff signed up for the competition's database? Because every once in awhile a station will recruit focus group members through their database...and like we did in San Antonio, the opportunity to get 20-25 people undercover to pick all the wrong songs, is just too good to pass up.

Melt Her Heart

There are three things I know in life to be true: there is no such thing as good flan, at some point in the next couple of months a jeweler will ask for you to give away a diamond and there will be a summer heatwave.

Heatwaves always get TV coverage. The inevitable and predictable shot of kids playing in a fountain. You need to be that shot. You do that by freezing a medallion in a giant block of ice that is then carved into the shape of a heart. You then stick this, webcammed, in the station parking lot. On the morning show or on Facebook, listeners guess when the medallion will melt out and hit the pavement. Closest without going over, wins a diamond. I'm attaching a shot from when Q in Memphis did it for a trip to Alaska on one of those really temperate 2000 degree days they enjoy down there.

Photo Graphs

Stagecoach is a HUGE Country festival in So Cal. From Chris Turner at KSON: We had the large cardboard cutouts of some of the stars...and encouraged people to stop by our tent and take a photo with their favorite star of Stagecoach. We took the photo...then gave them a small take-away card that had download instructions (or a QR code they could scan that would take them directly there)...when we uploaded all the photos (same day) we ran it through a program that put a commemorative stagecoach/kson picture frame on it. The takeaway card also asked them to tag us on facebook...and the other side of the card gave them info about gas promotions "tanks for listening".

Auto Graph

One of the stations has some very cool celeb/artists coming in and will be loading up on signed stuff to giveaway. No one has ever done the bit where you write the calls in soap in your rear window and get spotted to win. We take autographs for granted. The listeners don't.

Or, as Justin Riley suggested, have a line of cars, an artist, and as people drive past, they sign the rear window in permanent marker.

You could ALSO have them lean in and sign the dashboard. 1000 years ago an intern borrowed my car to go to the Travelodge in Portland to pick up an artist I'd rather not mention. In addition to later having their way with Wendy, they wrote their names all over the backseat. The signatures were there until a semi destroyed that cool little Toyota on the way back from the Auto Show at the St. Paul Civic Center.