CPR Promotional Check-Up - Apr 26, 2011

Cinco de Mayo

Most stations acknowledge this with a St. Patricks Day-ish club gig: just changing the name of their Monday night bar gig and adding in "Corona specials 'till midnight!". Yee hah. And it's a wonder we're in a battle with small personality-less things that clip on your belt.

• Obviously, if there is a local celebration, parade or similar gathering, you'll want to be there. Most markets have a Hispanic neighborhood and these events can be very very large. The one in South St. Paul draws about 50,000 people.
• Parade? Absolutely you should be in it. You could also do what Kiss in Cincy did but in reverse. For St. Patricks Day a couple years back they entered a Cinco de Mayo float and handed out thousands of jars of salsa. They were very apologetic. Their calendar got screwed up.
• Ask me to and I'll walk you through "Margarita In Your Pants"
• Your weekend contest should somehow be themed around it. It's a Wednesday this year. Having the promo voiced by the worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila would be funny.
• "Worms Gone Wild" is either a club gig or a video or a weekend theme.
• Speaking of weekend contests, you could do an "M&M Weekend": Movies and Mexicans. Go to down to a video rental place in the Hispanic part of town and get some Spanish-dubbed popular films. Air a clip every hour and the first person to call in and ID the flick gets whatever movie passes you have.
• An "S&M Weekend" would be "Seats & Meals": tickets to a movie and dinners before-hand.
• You can stick "Cinco" in front of pretty much anything. Cinco de Tickets. Cinco de Flicko. Cinco de Clubs. Cinco de Brazilian Exchange Students.
• One of my favorite Wild/San Francisco weekend promotions was "Mexican Or Not?" They named an artist, like Ricky Martin or Shakira or Gloria Estefan and you had to call in and say whether they were Mexican Or Not to win.
• Mexican Idol? Very simple. Find a karaoke company that has lyrics printed in Spanish. Have listeners warble along in Spanish to "Poker Face" and other hits.
• Post-Sacramento it might be difficult to get a jalapeno eating contest past corporate, but you should try. Power in Miami had someone do that for Superbowl tix a few years back. It was amazing. And very visual when they were regifted onto the sidewalk.
• Worlds Largest Margarita? Anytime you stick "World's Largest" in front of an item or event, you're 50% more likely to get press. Kiddy pool would be necessary.
• How about doing an "S.O.B. Party"? South Of The Border trips for people who wins various contests.
• One of the stations was going to try and pull off a "big stunt" last year and flip to all Spanish. As I explained, in 1978, that would have been huge. There are now Spanish stations IN every market. They did it anyway. No one cared.
• Random Acts Of Mariachis. KKMG in Colorado Springs did this and visited offices all day with musicians.
• An "Illegal Alien Weekend" would include bootlegged copies of the film "Alien".
• The Human Pinata. Old bit. Did it first at a club with Mancow in 1992. We actually hung an intern from a crane. You could just as easily Velcro prizes to an intern and have blindfolded listeners beat them off. (Sounded better in my head)
• "Illegal Alien Idol" was a bit at one of the stations. They got some undocumented workers singing and performing for cash prizes.
• What if you went somewhere where there is a fence, climb it in ten seconds and win a green card. Which of course could be a gift card that just happens to have a greenish hue to it. Could be for anything. Groceries. Gas. Clothes. You don't actually say on the air what it is; leave it at "A green card".