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As a Marketing Director, I always had prize criteria or promotion criteria established. It kind of helped keep the AE’s in check. Didn’t stop them from trying to sneak a scud past the radar, God forbid, but that’s their job I guess.
We don’t give away prizes that it will cost more in gas to come and pick up then is the actual value of the prize. Like $1.42 Wendys Chicken Wraps I heard on a station two weeks ago. (Really; have we sunk this far?)
We don’t do trivia based on the clients’ product.
We don’t do (Client) Prize Packs. We’re in the Communications Industry. If we can’t come up with a better way to phrase it, then all hope truly is lost. And you need to add a station prize to it. Something. Anything.
We don’t do “Write Our Jingle” contests.
We don’t do anything that involves listeners calling in and telling their story about using a clients’ product. Like the Swiffer Broom promotion I heard on a CBS station about five years ago. Listeners calling with their housework horror stories.
Or the carwash promotion that we narrowly averted last week at a client. The carwash wanted, A. “Unsolicited DJ Chatter” (Danger, Will Robinson. When that phrase appears on a proposal, run away. Screaming. And flailing your arms in the air.) and B. listeners talking about dirty cars.
I have some criteria for a Promotion. Next time you’re sitting there and noodling with what to do for Fathers Day or a themepark opening or a floral client or a fundraiser for the Boy Scouts or fishing opener or, well, anything, use these as a litmus test. If you can apply even one of these to your contest or promotion or event, it will hands down be a homerun. Two of these criteria? Don’t get cocky. Doesn’t happen that often. And how sad is that?
1. It’s “Entertainment Related”. It ties into movies or sports or music. Car washes do not apply.
2. It provides “Quality Time” with the airstaff and the listeners. I love bus trips. Forces the DJ’s to hang with the listeners. Getting up and introducing a movie is NOT Quality Time.
3. It “Evokes Emotion”. It can make the audience mad, happy, sad, whatever. Any emotional response is a homerun.
4. It’s “Topical”. Miley Cyrus was topical as Hell for a week. Topical is Topical for fifteen minutes.
5. It’s a “Mall Idea”. In your mind, can you imagine doing this, coming back in ten years and randomly talking with people in a shopping mall and having people recall it? Mall Ideas never involve giving away a car or a cash contest. It’s always something that drove the wrong way on the highway so-to-speak. It violated Radio Rules.
6. It’s involved a “Tease”. There was a creative and compelling set-up to it.
7. And, it’s “Lifestyle”.
People talk about “living the lifestyle.” And yet 99% of CHR stations are programmed by men. And I’ve met many many many of them who have NO clue as to the lifestyle of the audience. It’s actually frightening. One of these Mensa Candidates told me that his audience of 18-34 women wouldn’t feel strongly enough to participate in a Breast Cancer event because, and I quote, “They don’t even start getting mammograms ‘till like they’re 40.” And this guy has a job.
The best thing I tell Promo People is that they can be enablers for the PD’s. Get them OUT from behind the computer and get them out on the streets meeting the listeners.
Lifestyle is more then just “our listener’s golf.” That’s fine. But let’s narrow it down and have some fun with it.
The best lifestyle promotion? Would be hard to explain to someone in another market. It’s that specific to the market. For instance, I attempted to explain to the people who I worked with in Charlotte, about ice fishing and deer season in Minnesota. They didn’t get it. Which is why, for a station in Minneapolis, something around either of those would be huge. And have been.
K-102 in the Twin Cities did something I lobbed at them a few years back: Trading Ice Houses. Two groups of men, with minimal funding, re-did each others’ fortresses of solitude. Large? Larger then large. And it sounded like the Twin Cities. What an amazing concept. But I’ve told people at the station in Ft. Myers about it and got blank stares.
With so many stations out there being absolutely generic and market non-specific, to have the aura of actually “being here”, is something we used to take for granted. It’s not anymore.
KDWB in Minneapols has a huge female audience. Do they go out in the woods and blast the shit out of poor defenseless deer with high-powered weaponry? No. But their husbands and boyfriends do. So the station acknowledged this annual pilgrimage of death with The Deer Widows Ball. The one weekend of the year when the ladies could all go out and act stupid and enjoy Female Bonding (not “dage”) was celebrated with a party for 2000 women and 30 male strippers at a club. Raucous. Kris the Promotion Director fled because she was afraid the cops were going to raid it.
You know what is another lifestyle characteristic of homeowners in the Twin Cities? Pride in your deck. The wooden thing behind your house. The thing with the lawn chairs and the grill on it. Sure, people have decks everywhere. But you’re not judged and put under a microscope about yours like we are here.
So, Cities 97, arguably the coolest station on the planet (cool because they don’t try to be; they just ARE) has a deck at their booth at the Minnesota State Fair. Biggest promotion of the year. A sea of radio stations doing every shift live for 11 days. A line of broadcast booths that you would find at any fair or festival in the country. But Cities has their airstaff lounging on a deck. Like 90% of their listeners have at home.
They nailed it. I try to explain to someone in Albuquerque about this great broadcast deck and they’d drug test me. But KTCZ hit it. This is “lifestyle” for their audience.
What is “lifestyle” for Portland, Oregon on Labor Day Weekend? Well, it’s anything outside. And I was there last year. It was a literal orgy of biking and kite flying and dog walking and yard work and, well, anything that would be outside. I listened to a station that may as well have been on the moon. No reference to the bacchanalia in the parks and the streets of the community.
What would I have done? I would have created the premise that the station was being aired out and I would have done each shift live from a different park in town. Nothing like a remote where we have to feel obligated to talk about specials on Kleenex; just doing the shows, live, and we just happen to be out in the masses.
That’s lifestyle for Portland. And if you tried to explain the concept to a station in Charleston, they wouldn’t get the beauty of it.
Lifestyle isn’t just the demo. It’s the marriage of them, their interests, their hobbies, their passions AND added with a twist of locality.
So, what is lifestyle for your listeners? And don’t get lost in vague generalities. Sure. 18-24 year-olds pretty much everywhere party and go to clubs? What if the specificity to YOUR market that is unique and definable? Figure that out and you are ¾’s of the way to a bases-clearing homerun.
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