CPR Promotional Check-Up - Nov 12, 2015

The Swiftie Selfie Scavenger Hunt

Sometimes if you take two promotions and combine them, you might just stumble on something cool.

Valentines is one of the best Hallmark Holidays for morning show features and promotions. Christmas Wish is a homerun every time. So Wired 96.5 put them together for the Valentines Wish and hit gold by helping some hapless dude award his wife with the Valentines of her dreams.

Ditto with Halloween: so MUCH you can do with it besides the inevitable club gig. And weddings in June are a Radio staple. So 102 Jamz in Orlando, in the middle of a 17-straight #1 books, did Love At First Fright and married a couple in a mock cemetery at Universal Studios. Hilarity ensured.

Scavenger Hunts? Always great and you can work TV coverage out of it with the right items. Again, Jamz in Orlando did a ten item hunt for NBA All Star Game tickets. Huge. In 2015, stations like NOW in SFO, KDWB in Minneapolis and 93Q in Syracuse have done versions with mobile devices at fairs and other big civic events.

Live With is a great Newcap contest that turns the marketing of the station over to listeners who carry cut-outs of the morning show around for 30 days, earning points for getting their photos on the evening news, and other challenges.

Marry the two? You get the 'QEN/Birmingham contest that has people downloading her photo and going around and earning points for getting it taken at various locations. The Holy Grail? 1989 points for getting your photo with Coach Saban of the Alabama Crimson Tide.

The winner got to go to Atlanta to meet Taylor.

Best Name For A Cruise Promotion

From one of the PD's: Song Voyage. A mashup of scrambled hooks. ID them all and go for a cruise.

A Morning Show Buzz Bit

One of my favorite Christmas bits was done by Dave at KDWB. In the midst of all the pre-holiday toy frenzy, he started talking about The Phlarmmy. The hottest toy for Christmas 2004. He staged a dozen or so calls from "listeners" who were talking about getting into fistfights at Target over the last Phlarmmy in stock. The story on CNN the night before. How some were going for $5000 on eBay.

Parents all over the Twin Cities awoke to learn that they had somehow missed out on the "hot toy" and terrified that their kids were going to kill them, besieged stores with calls, asking if they had any left in-stock.

A couple of years ago Jo and Twiggy at Trent-FM in Nottingham took it to another level. They invented The Stoydi. A bastardized "Idiots" spelled backwards. They literally created one from glueing together pieces of various toys. They cut a fake German radio spot for the toy. It was great.

So, what is the next level of a fake toy? Creating a fake celebrity...and killing him.

Again, this is the Art of acting as if everyone knows about this Christmas toy. I mean, you saw the Leno bit where he stood in line to get one? In this case, it's acting as if "How could you NOT know who Chris Stangler is?"