CPR Promotional Check-Up - Apr 17, 2020

In Case Your Listeners Are Crafty

More “killing time in lockdown” resources from Flo 107.1 in Denver.

For Our Friends The Car Dealers

From the lovely and lithe (I said “LITHE” damn it!) Terry O’Donnell at iHeart in Albany, and in Spring 2020, 68 likes, 96 shares and 2.7 K views is good:

the car dealership that I endorse is all about community, community, community. And even though they're having a rough time as well, they still go out each day and buy $50 gift cards at local restaurants. They then do a Facebook live at the restaurant and ask people to like and share it. Out of the people who like and share, one of them will win the $50 gift card. Here's the video we did yesterday.

Saving/Getting Clients

One of the things that Todd Kalman brought up in his guest-written eblast from two weeks ago was maybe redirecting them into using their schedules to supporting local charities.

The St. Paul Saints are a minor league ballclub that Bill Murray is part-owner of and they just took all of their on-sale spots and used the time to promote local charities. On KS95 they used their radio advertising for Dorothy Day Center and Second Harvest Heartland.

The Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul is doing a virtual egg hunt on their site with some really amazing prizes this weekend.

And what client doesn’t want people crawling all over their site looking for stuff?

Scavenger Hunts search. Treasure Hunts collect.

So what if you did a four-week treasure hunt with 20 clients? Each weekday you name an item to collect: “Today’s item, item #12, is a ticket stub from the Rolling Stones Steel Wheels Tour. Go to (client site) and screen cap (client) holding up the stub.”

At the end of the month you submit your items and get one entry for each one, in a draw. A daily prize from each day’s featured client would be good too.

And The Name Of The Store Is Hurrah…3, 4

In the middle of the bloodbath that was 2009, 102 Jamz, the #1 station in Orlando had $4000 on the books. This was about the point where CBS had an emergency confab of all their markets in the state at a hotel in Orlando to try to figure out what they could do to stop the bleeding.

The #1 answer from that meeting was that “great copy sells spots”. And not a lot of training had gone into teaching the sales team how to craft a great spot, so some of the stations started trolling for interns with writing skills. And they churned out amazing, masterful copy that did end up selling some schedules.

One of my favorite creative people was making starvation wages in Glens Falls and started writing ads for my clients at $50 a pop. That’s how she survived.

So….

….in about 2002 I was at a youth sports event and for some reason a guy jokingly yelled “Hurrah!” Without batting an eye, my friend Cathy did a little tap dance and said, “And the name of the store is Hurrah…3…4.”

It was the tag line to one of the most successful Radio campaigns in the Twin Cities for a chain of young women’s clothing stores in the mid-late 1970s.

The spot was a girl tap dancing and singing:

“This is a slightly irregular radio commercial for a slightly irregular store…3…4…Hurrah is the name and what they sell there’s irregular clothes you can hardly tell they’re so slightly irregular you can hardly see or care, you oughta get yourself a blouse, or top or shirt or jeans to wear, you never really know what they have at Hurrah but whatever they have is really CHEAP”

And then some guy with a voice would add in sales or new locations and it would end with her breathlessly saying “And the name of the store is Hurrah…3…4.”

Cathy’s ability to recall a campaign from 25 years previous spurred me to write something about it and every year since, someone, somewhere, trying to find a copy of that commercial stumbles on my piece and emails me about it. One was from a woman who ran an ad agency in Denmark and in 1976 had been an exchange student in Bloomington and the spot had stuck with her all these years as the singular great Radio commercial she’d heard and she HAD to share this with her team.

So here it is. It’s scoped by a Radio guy who recorded it off KDWB when he was in school in 1977. You miss the first couple of seconds and they divert from the regular format for her to do some ad-libbing at the end. But you get the gist of it

This is only top-of-mind because we’re trying to sell spots and I got this email yesterday:

Hello Paige,

Gina Woods