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One of my favorite people in Radio is Michael Martin at Clear Channel in Los Angeles. He’s a “Blazing Saddles” junky (heroin, too, I’ve always assumed) and his cellphone ringtone is “Mongo just pawn in game of life”. And as a Promotions Dude, I often felt that way.
Like the subzero morning in 1987 when myself and some other poor Mongo were loading giant plastic garbage cans full of postcards into a cement mixer truck on an icy morning at 5 am in Minneapolis. The station, WLOL, was at the end of a morning show contest that was sending John, Bob and Roger with 25 pairs of listeners to Hawaii for a week long broadcast. This was back when people sent postcards to enter these things and we’d amassed something like 175,000 entries that were stored in big, heavy duty rubberized plastic 55 gallon garbage cans
Little known fact: you could keep putting cards in the cans, the weight would compress them down and it just seemed like you could keep loading them in forever. Well, we filled four of those suckers. When it came time to award the very last trip, Hines had one of those genius ideas that only a genius morning guy would have…without actually thinking through how it would get pulled off.
John’s idea was to load the (seemingly) 8000 pounds of post cards into a cement mixer. One of those big ones. And live on the radio, it would start spinning and the postcards would start flowing down the trough and the VERY last one would get the trip.
Which is why the Mongos were standing in -2 temps loading garbage cans of postcards into the freaking cement mixer. (I pointed out that this was Minneapolis in January, right?) At 7:15, trailing a mike cord, John, Bob and Rog rush outside, the thing starts spinning and the cards start flowing. And darn it if Hines didn’t nail it.
They streamed down like some lava flow of pictures of the Wisconsin Dells and Dollywood. Un-compressed and probably “fluffed” by the spinning, the postcards QUICKLY filled the four containers, and yet, they kept coming. And coming. Until, like the feather at the end of “Forrest Gump”, the very last card bounced down the trough and into John’s waiting hands. They then rushed back into the warmth of the Itasca, leaving me and Mark to deal with a three foot high pile of postcards that were quickly freezing to and becoming-one-with the cobblestones of North First Street.
I turned to Mongo #2 and commented, “I sure wish Channel 11 had shown up. That would have looked awesome on TV.”
And miraculously, or not, today your audience can see all the cool and photogenic bits we put out there. Which begs the question: why are many radio station websites so lame?
I was at a station a couple of years ago and being at the end of a two week jaunt across the southeast, had pretty much exhausted my supply of clean clothes. I think I was down to Loony Tunes boxers, jeans and a shirt that said “I Ate TheWorm”. So I stuffed all the dirty stuff in the bag they provided, left it at the front desk and returned that night to clean underwear. (Wow, was my mom right.) On the box were the drycleaners logo and their website address. So, out of curiosity I punched it up and it was frankly, about 800% better then the website of the station I was visiting.
The A#1 Excuse I get when I ask why there’s no new content is, “We have trouble getting it up. We send it off to (insert company or corporate IT guy) and they’re really focused right now on (new station) so we’re a low priority.”
Same thing happened at Wild 98.7 in Tampa. So they hired a Street Teamer whose job was to come in an hour early every day and post the pics from that days morning show. It’s not rocket science.
Who do radio stations hire to do their websites? Is it the best designer? No. It’s the best sales person. The person most skilled at coming in and doing The Dance. When it was time to finally get one done, I went to Forest Lake Highschool, posted a 3X5 card on the corkboard and a week later, a kid named Joe had it done. www.cpr-promotions.com . All for $300 and some concert tickets.
The best website designer is named Dookie and is 16 and lives in his parents basement.
Your audience has the attention span of a Golden Retriever. They will visit your website twice and if there is no new content, well, good luck getting them back. So the biggest challenge? New content. And if you think about it, it’s the easiest of all the hurdles to overcome.
Radio station websites have become a NASCAR-like dumping ground of clients’ added-value. If you’re going to do something for a client on your website, then you’d at least hope that it would work for them.
Case in point, a brand of chili that did promotions with stations across the country prior to the Super Bowl. It violated the And Then Rule. (My name for the Hoops Rule). You went to the Sunday paper and sorting through the remnants of a hectare of Brazilian rainforest, you found their coupon. And then you listened to the morning show for a question about the coupon and then you went to the website, and then your listeners all went and bought iPods.
Fly 92 in Albany had tickets to Finding Nemo On Ice. (My first guess was “fish market”) They stuck a little Nemo on their website. Find him and win. It was buried in the hair of a listener in a picture from a club. It was like that old game in Highlights magazine. Picture Search. Hits? Exploded. And it’s all about the hits.
I’m a mega gazillion point traveler on American Airlines. They have a great website and on a regular basis, will do a contest that offers bonus points. They’re to-a-one, fun, creative, visual little promotions that SUCK YOU IN and ingrain all their new destinations and sales while you try to figure out the picture of the landmark the tourist is standing in front of. I haven’t won, but I have steely determination. It’s only a matter of time…
When was the last time you spot-checked your website? It will scare you to death. Be prepared. While perusing various station websites, in addition to the ridiculous number of typos, I’ve spotted:
- A station that in their picture section had a photo of a listener getting a key at some car event. They mis-identified their own station. Without outing them, it would be like going to the Q-102/Cincy website and seeing “Debbie Thomas gets a key that could make her a winner of the Q-103 Ford Escort!”
- The jock bios at one station that listed, as “Favorite Music”, genres and formats that were so far removed from their own music that a reader could only surmise that the airstaff hated their own station’s product and it was just a paycheck.
First, if under your Photo section, there are pictures from five events, some dating back to last June, what does that say? It says the promotionally, you don’t do anything.
Just as there are Cliché Bits (Dinner On The Mayflower, Win A Key That Could Start A Car, The (Dial Position) Days Of Summer, Family Fou…you get the idea) on the Radio, there are clichés on station websites. Jock bios, for instance, all look the same. Seriously. You have your Glamour Shot Photo and the Ten Questions With. How can you mix this up and have some fun?
* Joey and Heather at Wild 104.9 in Oklahoma City use photos from when they were children, at www.joeyandheather.com
* Mauler at Hot 89.9 in Ottawa has this to say on his portion of the Bio page: Mauler is a DJ. His bio is currently being mailed to the station. To fill space, here are 5 choices he recently made:
1. Blue, 2. Left, 3. The other one, 4. Meg Ryan from Top Gun, 5. Bacon
The 5 other choices were:
1. Off white, 2. Right, 3. That one, 4. Rick Springfield from General Hospital, 5. Chair
* The jock photos at Mix in San Antonio were, for awhile, police sketches.
* Johnny and Jody at WHNN in Saginaw wrote each others bios. According to Johnny, “Jody was raised by a strict German mother who beat the crap out of her on a regular basis.”
Radio stations have in recent years thrown themselves into the building of huge, monstrous databases. Good. They have become a wedge in our Promotional Pie. But they’re not the whole pie. I saw a CHR take all their contesting off the air and put it in the Frequent Listener Club. Ratings attrition began almost immediately and stopped ONLY when they put the contesting back on the air.
Why? Because so few people play contests? Because it’s the Show Business. Money buys excitement. Money buys promos. Can you take website contesting and make it sound incredibly fun and scintillating on the air. Maybe. I just haven’t seen it.
Falling back on the And Then Rule was a CHR that did a great and incredibly visual morning show bit over the course of the week. The kind of thing that God and Al Gore invented the internet for. But it was only available to members of their social networking club. Of which there were only a couple of thousand at the time. To watch and then call in and win big cash at set appointment times, you had to sign up, get a password, log in…whoops…too much work. And as a 16 year-old I know said (heavy dripping teen sarcasm is assumed) “Yeah. I want more spam.” So an amazing bit was viewable to 3000 people in a metro area of 2,000,000.
One other thing about databases; is yours a VIP Club? That’s fine, as long as you have the only VIP Club in town. And I’ve seen some markets where there are no less then four radio VIP Clubs. Nice. And as an intern at a station we’re about to launch commented, “’VIP’ doesn’t mean anything anymore. Costco has a VIP Club.” Which is why that station’s database will be the A List. It denotes privilege and exclusivity.
Don’t get locked into the “the website is not tweakable” mindset. Every Hallmark Holiday is an opportunity to have some fun with it. Barry Adams at Wired 96.5 in Philadelphia goes crazy every Christmas. It could be as simple as just cascading snowflakes. But he goes about ten steps beyond that. I saw a Clear Channel CHR where, for Halloween the front page looked like it was “printed” on the skin of a pumpkin. There was actual texture, damn it!
Leaving your site as-is opens you up to looking like an idiot. The week before Christmas is an orgy of themes and fun and a swirling mass of lifestyle opportunities as your audience prepares for the Big Day. I visited an AC station where there was NO reference to the fact that in four days, the lives of their audience were going to make a massive change. If they hadn’t already. No green and red colors. Not ONE use of the word “holiday” or “Christmas”. We work in an industry of Mensa candidates.
Because so many radio stations have become generic-sounding, non-localized entities that could literally be anywhere, that’s another logical extension of the site. Could it be as simple as a silhouette of the skyline? Could it be a whole lot more? Absolutely. Drape yourself in the market and make it come through on the site.
I spend a tremendous amount of time in hotel rooms and have, on more then one occasion, spent a lonely Saturday night watching COPS and Googling old friends and acquaintances. And most have nary a hit on the internet. Younger people will have Facebook and myspace hits, but for the average schmoe out there, they’re non-existent on the worldwide web.
There’s your hook.
Did you know that one of the biggest genres of websites in Brazil translates loosely to Party Crashers. Teams of people who go out every night to clubs, discos, parties, events and beaches and take thousands of pictures of people. They get their names and post them. So it’s a slow day at work? You search the directories for your friends. I found three shots of Bel, one of my old exchange students, in different stages of inebriation at clubs.
Every remote, event, appearance club gig you have should have a promo person with a camera, snapping away. If you can’t do the directory, then at least do what Wild 94.9 in San Francisco does and hand them a piece of paper with the website address and a reminder to check for their picture the next day. They do and immediately forward the link to all their friends, thus driving the hits. Geez. That IS rocket science.
Finally (I know: this became one massive vowel movement. I promise that future missives will be more succinct) you need to think visually.
Everything we do seems to have the stated goal of getting press. But we rarely get that 22 seconds on the late news. Why? Because we don’t think like TV cameramen. We give them crap to film when they show up.
Take that mindset and apply it to what you’re doing on the morning show for St. Patricks Day. As much fun as filming people drinking green beer would be, what would look great on the website and have everyone emailing the link to all their friends and coworkers? A mixing leprechaun? Leprechaun Races? (A diaper crawl with babies in green Huggies)
If some idiot can take a video of shooting a bottlerocket out of the buttcrack of his roommate and get 800,000 hits on youtube, then that’s your litmus test. Because we’re in a youtube society of constantly changing-in-popularity visual content.
I’m like most people. I have an internet routine. Several websites that I either check first thing in the morning or during breaks in the day. CNN. Am I Annoying? Meet An Inmate. Nothing Toxic. Smoking Gun. You get the idea. If you can make your website one of those, not just favorites, but routines, then you will have won.
And it’s as simple as constantly updated content, good topical graphics, recap visuals to promotions, and photos. Lots of photos of listeners.
I know radio station web people who keep their job by making it seem like it’s a daunting and frightening technology that only a few skilled people have the knowledge to meddle with.
It’s not. Ask any 14 year-old.
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