CPR Promotional Check-Up

Nah Nah Nah Nah Nah Nah, Nah Nah They Say It's Your Birthday

Regular reader Jerry Ramsay with KSII in El Paso (or as I like to call him, "The one that's not a 3rd shift motel desk clerk in Modesto) asked me to do a "thing" on station birthday parties, events and campaigns.

First, ya gotta be careful:

• We care about these things more than our listeners do.
• If you're any kind of contemporary format, you can easily and unintentionally image yourself as "the old station my parents used to listen to".

The biggest danger is again, making too big of a deal out of something that people don't care all that much about.

Basic Paige Rule Of Thumb? I've seen stations try to turn a year over to their anniversary. A car? That's a month contest. And there's an actual pay off with that. A year is a LONG time to bludgeon people over the head with, well, anything.

It's a month. At most. And since people have the attention span of a Golden Retriever, I'd change the imaging frequently, have weekly events and if you're going to commit yourself to it, then:

• Make every remote or appearance part of the celebration
• Google-ize the website
• Get artist drops
• Change the jock bio shots to photos from when they were at kiddy parties
• Again, there needs to be a payoff for the listeners and not just some club gig that's been themed as a birthday party. Turn your contesting into birthday presents
• Have a self deprecating sense of humor. Do your event at a Chuckee Cheese. Get artists to record stunned acknowledgements of the date, amazed that you'd lasted this long.
• Do "Blow And Go" for your event. Have a virtual birthday cake on the website. It's the stations' newest technology: prompt the listener to take a deep breath, blow, keep blowing...STOP. If all the candles "went out", then they get passes.

With every station doing SOME similar version of a birthday or anniversary event, you need to tweak or change your theme to get noticed. Mancow? We did a 107th Birthday Party at Wild 107. It was our 107th birthday. 107 days old. And no one could have been more surprised than all of the artists and local luminaries that we'd actually managed to be on the air that long.