CPR Promotional Check-Up

Promotions That Give You Gas

"Gas" is a Promotional Position. Like "Weekend Contests", "Streets", "Community Involvement", "Concert Ownership" and "High Schools" for the CHR's and Rhythms. One station in every market, when the prices spike, do something and take ownership until the next round.

Promotions is all about being topical. And gas prices are topical. And going back up. Again. Someone in each market is going to do a gas promotion that blows everyone away and gets covered by the media like its OJ III. Let this be you. Please. Perfect example: BRMB in Birmingham (UK) did April Fuels and invited everyone to come down and "get tanked" with Jo. Look at the pics. Mayhem is never a bad thing. http://www.brmb.co.uk/photoWallPhoto.asp?wallid=61706 It's over for this round. Any station in that market that tries to do gas will look lame. Until the audience's attention span fades in about four months and then its open season again.

The Gift That Pays Off In Dividends
What could possibly be the best prize you could give a listener? Stock in an oil company. Go to www.oneshare.com (.net is my website, because I guarantee that you'll at least get a one share)

Gasp For Gas
Started by the very very strange minds at The Giant in Thunder Bay. You pump gas for as long as a listener can hold their breath. Finally, something visual BESIDES the long lines, for the TV crews to cover.

For The Longshot
It's become a cliché joke in Radio about how TV will go out of the way to NOT cover us. Or at least not give us credit. About half the time you do one of these big gas giveaways, you get TV chopper coverage. From 500 feet, all those rollerbanners you so meticulously spent seven hours hanging are not going to show up. I think Wired in Philly was the first station I ever talked into sticking a massive banner on the roof of the gas station. Try editing around that.

For The Closeshot
Anyone? What is the camera angle, the shot, they ALWAYS get? The hand sticking the nozzle into the tank. Consequently, whoever you have pumping needs to have little logo'ed tats or stickers on their hands.

Beat The Pump
What if you got your gas the old fashioned way: you stole it. Like what 95.7 Jamz in Birmingham (US) did when they "hired an intern named Rodney" who was straight out of juvie. In a theater-of-the-mind methodology, they sent him out with a length of rubber hose to suck fuel out of people's cars. He had a cell phone and called in as he lurked in the parking lot behind a movie theater (as an example) looking for a car that didn't have a locking gas cap. The caller got as much gas as he could siphon out before he got busted. I wrote the imaging so that Rodney slowly went blind from the fumes.

Semantics
Talk in terms of gallons and not dollars. Sounds bigger. And please, for the love of all that is good and decent in the world, this is a great great great prize: don't emasculate it by calling it a gas card. White Castle has gift cards.

Stick & Pump
Probably not the name you want to use on your Smooth Jazz station. But you should use your event to get stickers on cars. Or, to reward people who have stickers on cars with free gas.

We're Taking Over Another Station
Please don't do this. This is like "We're going to walk naked down the street": so transparent that anyone can see through it. If someone does this call me. We'll bust it and get your entire fleet gassed for free, like KDWB did to KS95 in '00. Nothing like showing up for a gas promotion at 5 am to start hanging banners and finding 17 radio station vehicles lined up.

Gasbates
I've lobbed this out before. The resorts in Wisconsin, which live off the Chicago tourist crowd, started filling up their guests tanks before they went home last summer. Took a little sting out of the long drive for a summer weekend away. You're asking people to get in their car and drive to a remote and buy carpet? You might want to offer them something more then just pizza.

Who You Should Target
I love Sales. They work their ass off. People say "no" to them all day. And they get no respect. But please don't rely on them to get your gas station. One of the CPR stations waited over 120 days for the client to make a decision...and they eventually said no. And their competition blew them out of the water with a great gas giveaway while they were waiting. Ya know who is best? Mom and pop gas stations. Because they can do anything they want. No one to tell them what to do. So the question is: what do you have that they'd want? Front row tickets to Justin Bieber with a meet and greet, for their niece and all her friends? A traded trip to the Bahamas? Ask. Cash doesn't have to be your only option.

We're Offering The Cheapest Gas Prices
This has been done many times. Open up a bidding war. The station that sells gas for the least amount of money gets trips or concert tickets or free spots. Ten years ago Dave Ryan did this at KDWB and got it down to negative ten cents a gallon. That's right. For every gallon they pumped, they had to pay you a dime. SHUT DOWN South St. Paul. Traffic for miles in all directions. They gave the owner a traded trip.

Get Trucked
I've thrown this out before. Get a gas truck and drive it around. Set up in neighborhoods and pump gas. This can be done as witnessed by KGGI in Riverside where they prowled the streets with the morning guys sitting on the roof dressed as Arab sheiks.

A Dial Position Amount
Granted $1.02 gas is nice, but seriously? It should be free or insanely inexpensive. So I sat in line for three hours and I save $11? Wow. That's almost as nice as the free stamp you gave me at the post office on Tax Night.

Fear Factor Fill Up
A bit from The Morning After at KOB-FM where they had the listeners do something exciting like reach into a box of spiders to get the privilege of being pumped. Another terrific visual for TV.

Don't...
...announce your location until it's almost time to start. A Mensa candidate PD at one of our old clients promoted their dial position amount and the location for 24 hours. Enough time for the competition to get the next gas station over and do free gas. Idiots. Life would be boring without them.