CPR Promotional Check-Up

Weddings

I remember the first on-air wedding I did. It was 1987. It was pretty cool. But now, this path has been walked down so many times by so many stations that to have any impact at all, you'd better have a helluva hook. With that said, here are some hooks:

• Marry some pets
• Have the couple and the wedding party all be naked
• Marry some cousins and give them a trailer home (I know, it's a stereotype. I apologize to my white trash, in-bred readership.)
• Let the listeners choose who will marry who on the station website. The People's Choice Wedding
• Or have them not actually meet until they're at the alter. The Blind Date Wedding.
• Marry people and then divorce them the next day. The 24 Hour Wedding.
• How about underwater, at the bottom of the wave pool at a waterpark?

See? So much better then just another boring Radio marriage. Zzzz....

Visually Challenged Dating

Assuming (probably Mistake #1) that you're dialed in on the Super Bowl, the next biggie is of course Valentines Day. Unless you're doing Smooth Jazz, Lite Rock or anything else with a calming adjective as the prefix, there's no excuse for doing candy and jewelry. Why? Because that's what everyone will do, and you want to stand out, right?

Few people ever take Valentines out-of-the-station with the exception of maybe a wedding. More on that in a moment. A cool bit that I think I saw done first at 102 Jamz in Orlando was the old Blind Date thing. Basically they randomly paired five guys with five girls. None of whom saw each other before their night out. Even on their night out. They were all blindfolded so they couldn't see who they were going to dinner, a movie and to a club with. Yes: they sat through a movie blindfolded. Someone from the station escorted each couple and helped to make sure they didn't, oh, fall down a flight of stairs. The five couples spent a wonderful, if not sensory-heightened evening, getting to know each other without getting caught up in all the superficial things like "Man has she got a rack on her."

They were all taken home, and returned, blindfolded the next morning to recap their night and say what they thought of their date. And whether they would want to go out with them again. Then and only then did they remove the blindfold and get to gaze upon their partner. Cool bit. And nothing gets attention more then leading ten blindfolded people into a movie theater.

Clocking The Ho's

What the hell does that mean? Never quite figured that out. Anyway, speaking of clocks, here's a great exercise. Sit down tonight with an assortment of cold beverages and watch three hours of network television. Write down every plug and promo they do. What are they selling hard? How often? How far out?

Radio, often, does a horrible job of selling it's own shit. It's almost as if we're afraid to toot our own horns. TV "gets" it. Watch and learn. They pound it.