CPR Promotional Check-Up - Aug 15, 2017

Go Track Down Your Engineer

This has "Halloween morning show prank" written all over it.

Halloween At The Malls

One of the stations has a mall requesting something for Halloween. The standard go-to bit for Halloween and malls has seemingly always been the "trick or treating indoors" thing. It's great for if you are in a market where your listeners have genuine concerns about their kid's safety. But, say, at an AC station in Seattle? Probably not.

I love pumpkin drops. Look at David Letterman's first couple of years on the air: it was ALL about throwing stuff off buildings.

One of the stations did a promotion with a mall where they had a 400 pound pumpkin hanging in a net from a crane in their parking lot the week before Halloween. You needed to go into the mall and fill out an entry with a guess on how far the farthest piece 'o pumpkin was going to fly when it hit the ground. Closest or one drawn from all the correct guesses, won a $1000 shopping card at the mall.

And on Halloween morning, you're competing for TV time with costume events at schools and dog costumes at the ASPCA and other stuff. Pumpkin drops always get TV.

Things You Freeze For $500, Bob

Steve Jones and I once did a one hour stand up routine in front of all the sales managers and AE's from the Newcap Maritime stations.

One of the PEI guys was telling about how he froze an entire riding lawn mower in a block of ice (I live in Minnesota; mine still is) and put it on display in a mall. Guess how long until it melts out and win a new, dry one.

Seriously? How simple and cool is that? You could freeze ANYTHING in ice and put it on display. Do it.

Things We Do Not Do

One of the mantras I've always tried to drill in is that we should have some fairly strict rules about client promotions. We don't do trivia based on their products. We don't have more then one "and then" in the methodology.

Got a "thing" forwarded from a station to me this morning. First? No buy. Second? The station needs to come up with six qualifying prizes and a grand prize. Length? Six weeks. (A car is four weeks, max) And then the red flags: DJ Chatter and Write Our Jingle. We don't do DJ chatter. ("Say Dave, I was using the new Swiffer broom and it was great." "Wait Paige, that's not the one with the flexible rotating heads is it?") And in terms of Writing The Jingle, people don't do it. Because, well, they have lives. So to do a contest that gets no entries will only then open it up for them to yell at you and call you a failed station.