CPR Promotional Check-Up - Aug 16, 2021

Halloween 4 Sales

Kathy Higgins with Summit in Omaha has a 120 day policy for Hallmark Holidays/Occasions and getting packages on the streets. This is going to fall short by a month but we are now in the 90 day window for Halloween, so you should probably decide what you want to do, write it up and get it out there.

And this is not include all of the paranormal stuff, features, bits and guests that you’d expect in drive time.

Drive-thru Halloween We have no idea right now how the Delta variant is going to affect this Halloween. Kiss in Dallas did an AMAZING drive-thru event in the parking garage of American Airlines Area. And the Sonoma Media stations in Santa Rosa took a car wash and turned it into a haunted “place”.

Brackets One thing that we re-discovered with COVID is that brackets work. And in the past 17 months every variation of brackets have been done. Scary movie. Candy. Retro costumes. Haunted attractions. Past pumpkins. This is easy and sellable.

Pet Costumes Social media has done all our research for us: people like to dress up their pets. Beasley in Philly has a done a dozen of these gallery contests and they’ve been huge.

Halloween Road Show Roula and Ryan at KRBE in Houston do this every year (in 2020, virtually) and take their show, their games, their guests, theme it ALL in Halloween and do it live somewhere.

Blood Drive As done by 97.1 ZHT in Salt lake City, bring a blood mobile to a client and invite your audience down to roll up their sleeves.

Crypt Crashing The 31st is a Sunday so everyone’s house parties will be on the 30th. Get some food and beverages, dress up and crash them.

Trick Or Tweet Have instant updates on best houses for candy, themes, decorations and also neighborhoods to ignore because everyone is out.

Haunted Houses… …are to Halloween what malls are to Christmas. Now is the time to be locking down partnerships with the biggest and best of them in your market. The passes are great prizes to sprinkle in on the air. But the best part of these venues is the thousands of people who go out to see them on Friday and Saturday night. In fact, your leads are right here. hauntedhouseonline.com/find_haunts.cfm

Hallow-Meme From Ed Grube in Tampa, stage a photo with the morning show on the 29th and have listeners meme it for prizes.

Corneplex Another option for this kind of client would be to bring out a big inflatable screen and show a latenight movie in the corn maze. “The Shining” has one of the best maze scenes ever. That’d be fun.

Haunted House Central This is a massive family holiday. Don’t kid yourself. In addition to the haunted houses there are festivals, events, and corn mazes to see and do. Why not position your station as “presenting” Halloween in your town and on your website, have a complete listing of everything that’s happening in the market.

Worst Of…. Every year some local publication invariably does a “The Best Of…” issue and has the readers vote on the “best” in seemingly 300 categories. It’s usually a pretty big issue for these papers or magazines. What if, for Halloween, you mock it and do a “Worst Of…” poll on the website. Or “Scariest” poll. The scariest movie theater. The scariest public bathroom. The scariest place to go on a first date. Scariest hotel room (shameless plug) hotelnightmares.com Etc.

Malloween Trick or Treating is obviously the main event for most families on the night of the 31st. Unfortunately, many people don’t consider it to be too terribly safe anymore…so step in and provide a safe environment for doing it. We took over a mall in Charlotte, got all the stores to get their employees in costumes and have candy available, and did a Safe Trick Or Treating event in the mall. Drew 5000 people. We had pumpkin decorating, a kiddie costume parade, and games for the families. It was monstrous. 95.7 Jamz in Birmingham did this in 2001 and had such a turn out that they ran out of candy three times. All the mall merchants participated and it was great. One of the biggest things that station has ever done. And they have a history of doing monstrous stuff, if that tells you anything.

Better Then All Christmas Music? There’s a Christmas format station (sometimes two) in every market. A few of the stations have hit major homerun stunts with going All Thanksgiving for a day…before realizing their error and switching back. Why not “All Halloween” for a day? “Thriller” over and over. Why? Why not? Or, at 6 pm, go all “mood music”. Be the background sfx for thousands and thousands of homes where people will be handing out candy. Go to the Halloween aisle at Target. They have CD’s of this stuff. Why not give it to the audience for free? 6 to 9? That’s some killer TSL. GFR in Buffalo and FGR in Grand Rapids both did this in ‘09. And like commercial free Christmas music, “presented by…” a value client.

The Erotic Exotic Ball Carmy transplanted this from The Zone to Wild 93.7 in Reno where they did it in ‘02. BIG BUCK costume contests as opposed to the “$100 for the best costume” that most clubs do. They had The Human Petting Zoo. Lots of contests involving latex and sex toys. The station created something that Carmy called The Euphoria Lounge, which was a tent-like structure like a sheik’s harem would live in, made out of clear gauzy material and lit with black lights. It looked like a UFO and was basically a make-out room. How big was the party? KWNZ, the heritage CHR pulled 160 people. Wild had 1400 with a line still down Virginia Street to the casinos when they closed the doors. Wild in OKC called theirs the “Pimp & Ho’s Ball.” The hook is BIG, HUGE cash prizes. Understand: every Applebees, Chili’s, VFW and establishment with a liquor license is going to be doing a $100 cash prize. If you offer $5000, the freaks will come out. And with the freaks come the people people who want to watch. The last one of these I went to in Sacramento drew 8000 people. It got to the point where stations in that market didn’t even bother trying to compete against it. KDWB in Minny jumped on the ballwagon in ‘06 and for a 1st-time event, the listeners really seemed to grasp the concept. Each year was bigger for them.

A Festival On the other hand, who wants to be inside? Party Radio in Phoenix took over a park and did a Halloween festival on a Saturday afternoon. They had story-tellers, face painting, candy, bounce houses, costume contests…it was great. And it took them maybe two weeks to throw it together. They got a great park in a lower-income section of town and became heroes to the parents and community for doing it.

The Virtual Haunted House Y-94 in Fargo did this and a bunch ‘o stations jumped on it. Everything you need to be scared spitless, in the privacy of your own home, right there, on your website.

Pumpkin Drops Hot 102 in Milwaukee did the best as far as I’m concerned. They found a 400 pound pumpkin and hung it 102 feet in the air from a crane in a mall parking lot. All week people were encouraged to go by and fill out their guess as to how far the farthest piece of pumpkin would splatter on impact. The closest guess was going to win a $1000 shopping spree in the mall. The day of the drop they did the morning show from the location and they “miked” ground zero to truly capture the essence of the stunt. On impact the farthest piece flew 122 feet! Cool. (Though it “flowed” more then it “flew”)

Q-104 in Halifax did it to award a trip to the Playboy Mansion. www.youtube.com/watch?v

Pumpkin Procrastinators Mickey Johnson did this with roses on Valentines Day when he was at Hot in Jacksonville. On the 31st load up the van with pumpkins and set up at an intersection, handing them out to the people who’d either forgotten or waited until the last minute. On-site at a client, much like Hubbard in Seattle with their massive potato giveaway.

Go The Distance There was a guy in Wisconsin in 2000 who developed this giant catapult that launched pumpkins up to a quarter mile. Catapults. Cannons. It sure would be something fun to do the next morning when everyone has all these used pumpkins on their hands. Plus don’t forget: they blow up real good! There’s a really good one that Froggy in Santa Rosa has been associated with.

Modeling Costumes Michelle Heart with TSM in Boise lent herself out to a costume store client and modeled all their stuff.

Rating Haunted Houses Take some kids out in a limo to all the “big” haunted houses, have them go through and then bring them in the next morning to rate them.

Visiting Hospitals There is no warm ‘n fuzzy that’s warmer ‘n fuzzier then visiting sick kids in the hospital. Get the airstaff, dress ‘em up in costume and have them deliver carved pumpkins and goody bags of coloring books and games to kids. Blaine, Lisa, Alyson and the rest of the airstaff from WDVD in Detroit did this in ‘08.

Visiting Offices I’d been at Wild in SFO maybe two weeks when Renee Taylor had this idea: she wanted to dress up and along with some costumed interns, take her mid-day show live to a series of offices and workplaces. It turned out HUGE. At every office they did bobbing for apples, had some cider, ate some candy, did some other thematic stuff and then moved on to the next location. And Allison the intern dressed as a harem girl, which is a story in itself. Fritsch did this as a drunken bridesmaid at Q-104 in Cincinnati.

Zoo Boo The zoo’s in some markets host family events around Halloween. Last year Pete & Wendy at Kiss in Atlantic City tied in with the Zoo Boo in their city and really got a good event out of it. It balanced out all the really “adult” partying stuff they had going on. One event that you could do would be a Monster Dash with little kids in costumes racing for prizes.

Midnight Movies Do you have the kind of relationship with a theater that you could organize a midnight screening of classic horror films? Charge $1.02 (or .95, or whatever) and donate all the proceeds to some childrens charity. Even if you can’t get a theater, maybe work out a deal with MCA Home Video or a similar company and get six packs of their horror videos (like “Nightmare On Elm Street”, “Psycho” and “Prom Night”) to giveaway with bags of popcorn and cell phones: the cell phone is because the killer always cuts the phone lines when he's getting ready to break into the house and slash the people watching videos and eating popcorn. The Flinn stations in Memphis do this at a drive-in theater every Halloween. The outdoor cineplex does all sorts of thematic movies that night. Pattie Moreno’s station in Palm Springs put this together as an all-day matinee of films in 2000. Made three phones calls and the whole deal was done.

Be Safe And Be Seen Another risk for trick or treating is the dark, and the fact that kids are hard to see. Giving out reflective strips for the kids to put on their clothes would be one thing to think about. Extreme Radio in Hawaii got thousands of logoed xyalume light sticks (those things you crack and shake and they glow green) at the New Years Eve N’Sync show. You could do the same thing on Halloween. Hang them on strings and the kids can wear them around their neck and be visible to traffic. Call your specialty item person and see what they can hook you up with.

Pre-Boo KUBE in Seattle has had one of the largest haunted houses every year in that city. A couple years back they hosted a gala grand opening the night before the house officially opened. For media and clients and their kids, they called it a Pre-Boo Party and saved a thousand or so guests from having to stand in the rain to go through the place.

Love At First Fright Or “A Scare To Remember”. Either way, with most stations doing the same thing over and over for Halloween, what would stand out? How about a wedding? Welch and Woody at 102 Jamz in Orlando did in ‘95 at the annual Halloween Horror Nights shindig at Universal Studios. It was a nice hook and it got great coverage.

A Promotion With A Plot Give away a cemetery plot. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

The (Station) Halloween House A regular Halloween bit from Power 96 in Miami that SBS in LA has done several times also. Basically they announce that some house in the market has $5000. You just have to ask at every door “Are you the (station) Halloween House?” In LA they narrowed it down to hot zips. Could be done with a client’s phrase or a client’s prize.