CPR Promotional Check-Up

Stamp Out Hunger

We're all in Crunch Mode for raising money for charity this holiday season. How about, and yes, this can be done, morning show postage stamps.

http://photo.stamps.com/Store/business/ is the link to see how this is done. Get 45 cent stamps done, sell them at remotes and donate the six cents to charity. Much like what the postal service has done for breast cancer research...and raised MILLIONS. "Stamp Out (hunger, whatever charity you're supporting)"

The Beard

A "beard" is a woman who poses as a girlfriend for a gay friend. This week you are going to have an influx of parents coming to spend Thanksgiving with their kids. What if you found one of these kids who is still in the closet and doesn't think that sitting around and eating turkey is the right time to spring it on their parents. Loan him a hot intern or the hot co-host of the morning show to be his beard for the holiday.

Dare To Be Stupid

For an industry that is supposedly free-wheeling and creative and rogue-ish, we're pretty buttoned up and inside-the-lines. Your resolution for 2010? Dare to hang it out there a little. Dare to maybe just possibly make a mistake and fail. Because nothing great in history has ever been accomplished by people who play it safe.

The greatest homerun hitters in baseball history? Strike out a lot. But they're up there swinging and when they DO connect, it's gone.

97 Rock in Buffalo did something in '06 that 99% of GM's (and even PD's) would say "You can't do that!!" And they would then give you 100 reasons why you can't do it. None of them good reasons, just reasons bent on fear and The Radio Bible that dictates how we should do stuff. And most of that is "because this is the way we've always done it."

The station in Buffalo, after one of the biggest music research projects in company history, announced a major new holiday format: All Thanksgiving Music. Yep. The stations that go All Christmas were totally missing a gaping music hole. Thanksgiving music.

Unfortunately there's only one Thanksgiving song, the one by Adam Sandler. After four hours the PD, John Hager, returned to announce that reading research is actually more difficult then he'd imagined. (Plus he was looking at it upside down) The real musical choice according to the numbers was exactly what 97 Rock has been doing all along.

They did a great job of staging calls from "listeners" requesting the Adam Sandler song and they had lots of imaging and sweepers like "More Music, Less Tryptophan" and "Plymouth: The Only Rock We'll Play".

Holiday concerts. Gas giveaways. Wii's. New Years bashes. Food drives. We ALL do these. And we should. It's the 1% that is stuff that is totally out of leftfield that is the stuff that cuts through. Everything else is instantly forgettable. Because it's expected from you.

Dare to occasionally not hit a "10". It's all right.