CPR Promotional Check-Up - Jun 16, 2016

Street School: For The Hospitality Industry

For the past 20 years I've had three hotels here at the Minny airport that have been my defacto layover or first-leg places to sleep. The one I'm at tonight? In 20 years I have not had anything closely resembling a bad experience. It all comes from the people.

You see that with hotels. And stations too. Certain stations just have amazing promo staffs. The Directors Of First And (Usually) Only Impressions. You meet them and walk away with a positive image of the station.

Taking the shuttle over from the airport there was a young woman who immediately struck up a conversation with me. Perky? Ridiculously so. I commented that she didn't have any bags. She replied that she was a new employee of the hotel and they sent her over to the airport for six hours of talking to people. Learning the layout so she could more effectively answer questions when she would get their calls, and more or less, to learn the mindset of the Traveling Public. To understand and empathize with these people when they showed up in crappy moods.

How cool and smart is that? They actually, shudder, put some thought into training their employees.

If you have an intern meeting, give them manuals to read and send them out to represent the station? Good luck.

Moms Into Lovin' Flicks

Or the MILF Club. This is something the Morning Hottub at Hot 89.9 in Ottawa have created. It's basically a database of their female listeners who they hook up with tickets to movies that their husbands/boyfriends would have no interest in going to. So they can go, eat popcorn, spend time with and enjoy a movie with, their best friends. Maybe they accidentally brush up against each other in the dark, their hands start to wander...sorry...I spend a LOT of time alone in hotel rooms

Other Names For Trips

I'm sure I'm missing about 200 more names, but one of the Marketing Guys wanted alternative ways to say "flyaway" and "getaways". (Which are pretty played out). My contributions were "road trip", "blowing town", "burning rubber" and "lost weekend". In case you care.

Things That Drop

One reason many of our promotions don't get the press that we so desperately seek to feed our fragile egos, is that they lack a good "visual". David Letterman made his mark doing what? Dropping stuff off a roof. With that in mind, here are some things to consider.

Back-in-the-day, KTFM once awarded a car by doing something they called The Colossal Crane Drop. They hung a true piece of shit car from a crane over a grid of squares on the ground. Each square had been awarded to a winner. The day of the final event they started the crane (and car) swinging slowly back and forth. As the clock ticked down to zero, the car was released and plummeted to the ground. Whoever's "square" the car landed in, got the new, un-smashed vehicle.

I've mentioned this before. 102 Jamz in Greensboro did much the same concept, but with $10,000 on the line, and instead of a falling car, it was afternoon announcer Busta Brown. The station awarded 30 squares to 30 winners. They each got $102 and joined the station at a local festival (built-in crowd: genius). At the appointed time a plane appeared overhead and Busta, tandemed to a jump instructor, leapt from the plane. Whoever's square he landed in got the 10 G's. Or, as I suggested, if the chute failed, whoever's the largest chunk of him landed in, got McNuggets and Reeses Pieces for life.