CPR Promotional Check-Up - Sep 23, 2022

Endorsements

Steve Jones had me get out of bed at some un-Godly hour and go downstairs to the hotel conference room in Moncton to do a presentation. I was going to go back upstairs and go back to sleep but he told me to stick around because the next guy, Tommy Kramer, was really good.

And he was. Sometimes “common sense” is confused for being smarter than everyone else. Three of the things I wrote down were:

• If you say, “Coming up in a few minutes and it’s more than five minutes, then you lied to the listeners. ‘Few’ is 3-5 by most people’s definitions.”
• If you say, “Join us at (car dealer) for (food item) and fun”, you lied to your listeners. No one has ever had fun at a car dealer.
• When you say, “My friends at (client)”, no one actually believes that a radio personality would voluntarily and without compensation hang out with someone who sold roofing.

Gross generalizations? Yeah. Maybe. But he had a good point about endorsements. If you want to get all Marshall McLuhan about it, if you want your endorsement to cut through all of the other endorsements on the radio, then you need to massage the medium.

One example? The Mommy Bloggers. One of the stations had Toyota come to the table with five cars for the airstaff to drive and blog about it.

The OM’s exact response was, “Who cares? They’re considered over-privileged to begin with and now they get a free car?” So he found five women in the audience from five different backgrounds or situations, they got the cars and they blogged authoritatively about how the cars improved the quality of their lives.

Or…have one of the talent’s dogs do the endorsement. Because who loves a car more than a dog? No one and nothing. I would literally be influenced by Aspen’s love for a car to maybe purchase it.

Paint It Forward

Charities and other non-profits have needs besides the services they provide. They also have infrastructure and maintenance so 93.3 The Q in Albuquerque gave away a $10,000 paint job to one worthy local organization.