CPR Promotional Check-Up - May 10, 2017

Proms

This is the time of year where you're going to start to see things like this pop up. If God should shine his Grace down upon you and your market and one of these kids is maybe one of your listeners, to not throw your marketing weight behind them would be kind of sad. You just need to keep your eyes and ears open. If I worked at a station where this kid lives, I would have become Emma-FM and helped to pull a banner over her house. http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/06/entertainment/emma-stone-prom-date/index.html

Millennials

One of the Alpha folks reached out and said that he realized that his station was really dropping the ball when trying to engage them. Good point. Being almost a Millennial, my first gut response was hashtag and photo sharing contesting. But then I asked someone else and she gave a pretty good answer:

I feel like hashtag contests only work well if you do them right.

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE a good User Generated Content Contest!
These are very measurable to selling a client to this means you need to be prepared for them to track how many submissions you get. The trick with this is that if the majority or your following has closed profiles you won't see the UGC. Also if you don't have many followers on your profile already is may be wise to set aside some $ for sponsored posts that specifically target the psychographics of your elusive millennials.

There is a really rad company called Tradeable Bits that can actually build and execute this for you with ads built in but it isn't cheap.https://tradablebits.com/blog/tag/spotlight/

Also Millennials quantify the value of a prize differently than other listeners.Concert tickets are great but an experience or money can't buy situations makes their hearts sing. They also love ways to give back or get involved some how.Think Toms one for one. Here is a link to a study about a younger demo ( teens) but it refers to brands, causes and social channels that millennials are using which may spark something for you.https://storage.googleapis.com/think/docs/its-lit.pdf I love when stations take online submission or social media submissions for causes that their listeners want them to support. Then it is up to the listeners to generate buzz for their cause. Like a mini station Kickstarter that is fueled by UGC and you take all of the credit. !!!

Prize vs. Experiences

I should add that 94/9 in San Diego does a spectacular job of ID'ing prizing that would move the needle with the above audience. So for two years they did nothing but iPads, but also in a way that there was some continuity to it, ie: it was a series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tTZ0vNlYyI

And regarding experiences...

A few years back one of the companies got really, man, what's the term...screwed?...by Katy Perry's label. The screwer in this scenario, even acknowledged as much to the screwees and offered Katy for anything that they wanted her to do.

We're Radio People. So, when we have to come up with an idea, we bring that perspective to the table. Which is why almost all radio promotions sound exactly alike.

The Radio People then came up with some great but rather Radio'y suggestions, like, winning a Katy Perry concert in your backyard.

The challenge is that Katy Perry without a full band and people dressed as dolphins is probably going to not be all that great.

So I reached out to about 50 women between 20 and 40, none of whom work in Radio and asked, "If you had Katy Perry available for an afternoon/evening, what would you have her do?"

Not one person came back with anything that remotely involved her performing. They wanted to go shopping with her. They wanted to go clubbing with her. They wanted to have a pillow fight with her. They wanted her to hold their hand while they got pierced. They wanted her to go and pick up their daughter at school in a limo. They wanted to go to a waterpark with her. One wanted to loan her to her husband so he could make his ex seethe.

Back when Bieber was on the cusp, Hot in Ottawa had Bieber go watersliding with a bunch of listeners. NOW in Indy got something like 1.3 million votes to have him be a school principal for a day. Those were cool.

So if you can, think beyond the typical Radio thing because usually Experience > Prize.