CPR Promotional Check-Up - Oct 15, 2021

The Dang Effect”

I was telling her one of the Promotion Directors about a station that was pretty cool and similar to hers. At one point they’d racked up 14 straight #1’s. And then they became a traditional station and fell off a cliff. She said, “They lost their ‘dang effect’. With her station everything they’ve done has gotten the audience to go ‘Dang! I wonder what they’re going to do to top that?’”

And that’s your litmus test. This thing you have planned for next week or Monday Night Football or Halloween? Will it get people to say “Dang!”? If it doesn’t, then tweak it. You can’t beat a station that strings together a lot of dangs.

Showing The Flag

Back when the British had colonies all over the globe they’d send their mightiest warships around to sit in the harbor, strike awe into the natives, basically remind them that they’re still a colony and then sail off to the next place.

Street Marketing is a little like that.

In the Twin Cities there are 13 surveyed counties but most stations really only focus on four of them because they’re where all the people live. We used to go out and Show The Flag. Slow Thursday in September? Send the van up to Isanti and cruise around. Park in front of the highschool, hand out some stickers, cruise up and down Main, go through the Hardees drivethru, be seen and then head off to Cambridge to repeat.

It’s like fishing. Except we’re fishing for diaries and meters. You wouldn’t stand on the dock and cast and hope to snag one. You go out and troll with a big net. And in the smaller counties, it’s easier to snag one or two.

* Donnie Simpson used to do an annual tour and hit breakfast places around DC, Maryland and Virginia.

* Dave Ryan’s done it in Minny and wisely chooses places that might be off the radar. If he hit Starbucks at the U, a hundred people would show up. If he comes out to Forest Lake to Kodiak Coffee, a thousand people will show up.

* The Wolf in Greensboro does it with barbecues and calls it the Home Town Handshake.

* As an experiment with Jamz in Greensboro we did the Flag/Van thing and ID’ed places that they’d ignored for awhile like Burlington. Ding. Next book they’d snagged a few diaries.

Radiowave in Namibia is pretty freaking cool. For the big international advertisers, they’ve created a nationwide system of transmitters that pretty much allows them to cover the entire country. 1000 miles from north to south and 500 miles from west to east. Radiowave is on a signal in every corner of Namibia.

So...they’ve sent some of the jocks out to show the flag. They’re going to try and broadcast from every community of any size, in the entire nation.