CPR Promotional Check-Up - Mar 21, 2022

The Best Question At CRS

At conferences I sometimes like to stop the attendees in their tracks and ask the room:

Q: “Why do radio stations have vans?”

This will get stunned silence and someone will reply “To haul our (bad term) around”. But also

A: When radio stations started to really embrace vehicles, ie, everyone had one, the teen audience trend dictators thought vans were cool. In 2022 I can’t imagine many kids begging their dad for a boogie van. (We had one. I was super fly).

Joey Tack asked the room, “Why do we insist on talent wearing polo shirts?” which got a groan from the room and a few managers slunk down in their seats.

First Crack At Mothers Day

You don’t really have to look much further than daytime TV to get all your Hallmark Holiday morning show ideas and themes. They’ve done all of our research for us; if “My teenage daughter is OUT OF CONTROL” didn’t work, they wouldn’t use it every five episodes.

I was at the Dallas airport and there was a mother with two kids who epitomized “My mom dresses too damn sexy!” The coat was alright I guess but the rest of the ensemble really was straight out of some Cabalero Home Video from 1987. She was Roller Girl. Literally everyone was peeking or trying to snap pics of her. And her kids were trying to stand as far from her as they could. Lots of future therapy there.

Anywho, get a fashion consultant and hair, makeup and clothing clients and do a makeover.

Group Contests

It’s a safe bet that 90% of my US clients will be doing these in the next, well, forever.

These can actually work but only if you get creative with them. Seriously, with the next round of these, go and listen to other markets and it will scare you straight. THEY ALL SOUND THE SAME. (Sometimes you HAVE to use caps). In Cleveland three years ago there were four stations using “Free Money” and “$1000” in their names for the contests.

102 Jamz in Orlando? GOT actual damn numbers off these things. How? They repackaged them so they stood out and sounded like the station.

You need a character and/or a premise or it will just be another radio contest that 4% of people will play.

What’s Local? Jamz used The Berglunds in a lot of their contests. If you lived in Orlando, you knew them. A large pale family from Minnesota who drove an RV slowly. In Cincinnati? Maybe it would be a fish fry. In Minneapolis? Maybe an insane hockey mom as the voice/premise of the promotion.

Boss From Hell KSFM in Sacramento and Jamz in Orlando have used bosses from Hell as the focus of their contests. Why were they giving away $1000 an hour? Because Craven had created ghost winners for fake contests and embezzled millions from the company, and he needed to unload all the money or get sent off to the joint. I have copy.

Or Just Steal It Like Jamzron, Steal It Before You Can Buy It and Download The Dough, you don’t have a budget so you get money for contesting the old fashioned way: you steal it.

Fun With Nigerians Like Hot in Houston when they had Chinese organ thieves do their contest imaging, have an internet scammer offering to give away a $1000 as a gesture of good will as you start the process of helping the royal family free up their seized funds.

WTF Win Thousands Free, as done by Power 96.

What Ails You? San Antonio and Denver used a doctor who wrote prescriptions of cash.

1-800-ASK-(Morning Guy) This is on the table at a station where they would parody radio spots for insurance companies by offering instant, $1000 settlements? Hangnail?? That’s a tragedy. A life altering event that YOU DESERVE TO BE COMPENSATED FOR. Here’s a $1000.

Cash….MAN!!!!! Radio NEEDS a Marvel-like super hero. Bills and liens are powerless against…CASH MAN. Kind of like KSON and Gas Man in San Diego. Without Gas Man, it would have just been another gas giveaway. Kiss in Albany uses him as the character.

Green History The promos would be vignettes chronicling the history of money. “This Green History Month honors…Timmy Olson. This industrious 11 year-old in 1956, discovered that by using a magnet on a string, he could recover spare change that had fall into street grates.”

(Artists) Bucks Much like one of the Country stations that got Brad Paisley to cut all of their imaging for when they “siphoned all the gas off his tour bus and gave it away in big red 10 gallon cans”. What if you got an artist’s ATM card? We’ve given away their cars, why not their money?

Moneyville Make your contest a Facebook game, played by fanatical people who continually are asking their friends to play along with them.

App Maybe your promotion is an app with amazing benefits.