CPR Promotional Check-Up

St. Patty's Day

• Many of you will be at a club. Excellent. Then you just need a hook to differentiate yourself from the 900,000 other green beer events happening next Thursday. Good luck.
• Don't have a club? No biggie. One of the stations has about seven parades in their market and they're going to hit them all. Do "Four-Leaf Rovers" and do a check-in from a different bar, every 20 minutes, starting mid-afternoon. Great way to press some flesh.
• A lot of you did phoners with Irish DJ's last year. Still trying to line that up for '11. It sounded, well, a LOT better then a remote from Chili's where there was green beer and cabbage. When my wife and I were in China for the 2nd adoption, there was an Irish pub in our hotel where the 700-or-so expats in Chongqing would gather to watch rugby every Sunday afternoon. "Raucous" doesn't even begin to cover it. http://www.st-patricks-day.com/irish-pubs-worldwide.html and http://www.irishpubsdirectory.com/download.php have worldwide lists of these places.
• Following the Balloon Boy, several of you hit huge-mongous homeruns with lofting prizes from balloons. What if you lofted a rainbow-colored array of balloons with a little pot of gold under them. Follow the rainbow to the pot of gold. And..."gold" could mean ANYTHING. Wild in Tampa once did Deck The Walls and gave out the framed gold and platinum records on their walls. Phones exploded. One of the stations is using "Gold" tickets from their local concert venue for Leprechaun Races next week. These $1000-value tickets are good for EVERY concert this summer.
• On the website? Cascading clovers would be nice. Any sense of greenery would work. I'd change the morning guy's pic to some evil leprechaun from a movie.
• I went into the bank AND the liquor store on yesterday and both have fundraiser deals happening where you can buy a green cut-out clover for a buck, right your name on it and it goes on the wall for St. Judes or something. This could/should be something that could be done on a website. Cover it with clovers that people have purchased and "signed" on-line.
• You could do this on the streets too. Blaine Fowler at 'DVD in Detroit covered a promo guy with green clovers last year and sent him out to be plucked, so to speak. Down to his skivvies.

Interviewing For A Promotion Director

One of the stations is going through that process right now. Here are four questions to file away for that possibility.

1. What is the biggest promotional disaster you've ever had? If they say they've never had one, they're either lying or not trying hard enough.
2. What is the best promotion you ever did? How they answer shows whether they're what you need. If they answer "A tri-partnered co-op vendor program that tied the stations digital platforms and Target into..." then that's great. If you need a Marketing Director. If they describe a summer campaign that threw backyard parties and crashed beaches, that's great...if you need a street animal.
3. What promotion have you always wanted to do but haven't? Great Promotion Directors always have goals, things they want to do that no one else has ever done.
4. Kit Kat wants that station to do a four week promotion where people submit 30 second home-recorded jingles for the client to win an iPod. Would you do this or would you rewrite it and how?