CPR Promotional Check-Up

A Promotional Scorecard

The little liquor store in Forest Lake where I will occasionally stop to make a purchase of beer, has Miller Lite signage that they put up every Fall. It's a week-by-week schedule for the Vikings, nicely printed and with a clear area next to each "week" for Nicki to Sharpie-in the score the next morning. 30 seconds in line and you pretty much can see how the season is going...or not.

Sitting with Clifton on a market visit is a trip. He treats every break as if it's a battle that must be won. With his little piece of crap radio, he'll bop back and forth between the two stations declaring "They won" or "You won" every few minutes. Win enough breaks and you should win the ratings, right?

I've thought that every weekend, every Hallmark holiday, every natural disaster, every sports playoff...was a promotional battle. Someone will win it and someone will lose it. Put together enough X's in your win column and if the music is good and the signal is good, you should win.

I'm intensely competitive. I would/will never concede any one of these. I almost lost my job at Wild in SFO because I changed the weekend contest at 7 on a Friday. We had movie tickets. Driving home, I heard KMEL doing Prince CD's with a trip to LA.

I pulled over to a payphone, called the indy, got a commitment, called the hotline, dictated the new liner and by 7:30 we were doing a trip to see Prince in Paris. We won but I got chewed out for not filling out the right forms. Who cares? We won.

You should create your own scorecard.

Map out EVERY battle for the summer of '10. Hallmark holidays. Every concert that matters. Every festival that matters.

Right now? Mix in Dothan has a check under Memorial Day "win" because they went out and did impromptu pool parties at apartment complexes this past weekend. AMP in LA gets the X because they had a better weekend contest then KIIS and better street presence. KSD in St. Louis got the X for honoring the troops on line that weekend. Wired in Saskatoon has four BIG concerts coming up. They started the summer with getting the X for Nickleback...which was the competition's show.

Do the exercise and treat each one of these shows, events, holidays as if it was D Day. And then look at the scorecard at the end of the summer.