Making Less Sound More

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 01 Sep 2014 Comments: 0 Tags: morning show, morning shows, promotion, radio promotions

First, with rare occasions such as golf and cologne, less is in fact not more. One of my favorite Clear Channel GM’s referred to that pogrom as “Our self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

When teaching Street School and discussing signage at events I always remind the promo kids that there are thousands of words in the English language that can be arranged like Scrabble tiles to create millions of sentences. But the sentence, “Tim, I was at the Katy show and you put up too many banners!” does not exist in the English language.

We need to be “big” and sound “big”. And to do that, sometimes we just need to be creative.

I’m a fan of semantics, theater, smoke, mirrors and even smoke ‘n mirrors.

Maybe my first experience with playing around with truth was when I was a van drive for WLOL in Minneapolis circa 1985-1986. (I was 11 and Emmis had notoriously lax hiring practices.) We had blitzed the market with a direct mail piece that included two bumper stickers, and magically one day, seemingly 1 in 2 cars had an ‘LOL sticker on them.

So we started a campaign of spotting cars and pulling them over to win $99. We did 2 winners in AM drive, one in the middays and two in PM drive. When I was out I was always “Paige in Spotter Van #14’. We only had one station vehicle but even the most casual listener would have been left with the impression that we had fifty vans on the streets.
Read more…

Paige’s top 10 selection of greatest radio promotions of all time

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 12 Aug 2014 Comments: 0 Tags: morning show, morning shows, promotion, radio promotions

I remember sitting through corporate meetings in LA when I worked for United Broadcasting. This was a company so mired in forms and Legal that even by today’s eff’ed up standards, they were freaking nuts.

As we broke out into meetings, and I was with all of the Promotion Directors and Marketing Directors, I suggested that really nothing great has ever been achieved in a conference room and since it was the middle of Winter and we were at the Ritz in LA, why not take it to the pool and do it in the sun.

You would have thought that I’d suggesting putting puppies in a blender.

The majority of our promo meeting, after we labored through some lame mission statement, was to try and create a form (they so loved their forms) that we could use to grade our promotions and events.

My thought, which was totally lost on the sheep, was that Promotions serves so many masters and that “success” or “failure” is really subjective based on what department you come from, that this seemed like kind of a waste. They looked at me like I had eels crawling from my ears.

I get that a lot. Read more…

When The World Is Watching

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio 22 Jul 2014 Comments: 0 Tags: #MonctonSpirit, #monctonstrong, Moncton Spirit, Moncton Strong, morning shows, power of radio, radio news team, social media

Radio is seemingly at its best when we’re “real” and drop any pretense of trying to be cool and funny. The great stations, the truly legendary stations are the ones that will drop everything when some big, important and impactful occurs in their community.

So, when the whole world is watching your market because of an unfolding news story, what will you do? Newcap in Moncton had that dilemma when a mad man on a shooting rampage held the city hostage for a day. This week’s blog is guest post written by Adam McLaren from Newcap.

When The World Is Watching

We knew we had a great team of people working for our radio stations, and everyone proved it as our city went through a tough & scary crisis. It was a beautiful late summer evening in Moncton, and the station was empty. Reports on Facebook started to surface about an RCMP officer being shot in the North end, quickly followed by reports of two additional shootings. This was serious. Just as I learned about the stories, I received a call from news director Mike who confirmed this was true. Mike was heading into the station to do live updates, and I was following in to op the reports. By the time we arrived at the station, the RCMP had officially stated that a manhunt was under way, and Mike had sent Cathy from the news room to the scene to do reports from the center of the action. Read more…

Have You Been Served?

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 07 Jul 2014 Comments: 0 Tags: airstaff, bad customer service, customer relations, customer service, morning show, morning shows, promo staff, social media

Have You Been Served?

One of the obligations I feel we have to our promo staff and even the airstaff, is to give them initial and then updated training on how to greet, meet and otherwise “work” the audience when we’re out at events. As great as giving college students additional reading material in the form of manuals, nothing beats a quick class.

I think, especially with the Summer hires, it’s important to remind them that they’re the first line of defense and that most people are far more likely to meet them than one of the talent and that life is too short to piss off even one listener.

I always use the example of Jo Jo Wright at KIIS in LA and John Hines who is now at CBS in Minneapolis.
Two very successful guys who have made a career of shaking hands and leaving people with positive experiences. This stuff? Pays off. Read more…

When Nature Hits, We Still Have Radio

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 26 May 2014 Comments: 0 Tags: Bosnia floods, floods, future of radio, humanitarian help, natural disasters, radio

Radio, as an industry, doesn’t seem to play well with others. Maybe it’s because we’re populated with people who were traditionally chosen last in 6^th grade phy ed team activities.

When I was a Promotion Director at a station we were approached by the local Boys/Girls Clubs to have our airstaff play the talent from another station in town in a charitable softball game. My PD was apoplectic: “What if we lose?”

I replied, “Fire everyone and actively recruit broadcast students who can drive the ball to right and turn a double play.”

Think about it; when was the last time you joined with other stations outside of your cluster for, well, anything?

After Katrina every station seemingly did “something”, which, don’t get me wrong, was great. But you had ten or eleven different relief drives all competing for dollars, water and attention. Dan Seeman was a GM at Clear Channel in the Twin Cities and successfully brought every station in town together for a morning show broadcast on top of the Washington Avenue bridge, which metaphorically bridges the Mississippi River.

It was large.

So, you may have seen that regions of Europe have been suffering from weather of Biblical proportions, and you probably don’t know that stations from all of the countries affected by the floods, have come together to aid the millions of people in distress. Read more…

Reality Check

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 05 May 2014 Comments: 0 Tags: Great Radio contests and Promotions, programming, promotion, radio promotions, reality tv

One of my favorite and most surreal conversations was with a morning show last Fall as we prepared to set up and launch their inevitable food drive.

The OM had already acknowledged some concern that “There are going to be like 7 or 8 other food drives happening” but the morning guy was undeterred.

I suggested hooks. Niches. Angles. No. He wanted to do a beg-a-thon.

Me: “Why are people going to give you food?”
Him: “Because I ask them to.”

Right.

So I came up with a story. Read more…

Showing The Flag

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 16 Apr 2014 Comments: 0 Tags: politics, radio politics, showing the flag, top of mind

I’ve always been analogy retentive and one of the fallback metaphors I use a lot is that Radio is basically politics. Except we’re ALWAYS running for election. And when someone straps on a 1980’s style pager dealie or sits down at the kitchen table to try to remember who they listened to the previous week, they’re either voting for you or against you. Read more…

Anti-Social Media

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Uncategorized 29 Mar 2014 Comments: 0 Tags: customer service, hootsuite, James Cridland, Mike Gartell, social media, Tweetdeck

Radio has, like we always seem to do, take something like social media and look at it with a very one dimensional vision: “Hey Bob, now we have another way to spam and annoy our audience.”

Granted, it would require “work” and “effort” but Twitter and Facebook have given us wonderful ways to court listeners and create fans.

Take this amazing story from Morton’s Steak House where they snatched a tweet out of the ether and created a true and loyal fan. Read more…

Terms That Need To Be Killed Off

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 17 Mar 2014 Comments: 0 Tags: played out term, played out terms, played out terms for radio

As members of the esteemed Communications Field I don’t think it’s lost on anyone that we fall into traps, ruts, patterns and other lawn hazards when it comes to naming features.

Tommy Kramer had a great line:

“If everyone is doing something, DON’T DO IT.”

So why would you have a weekend theme or prize term that’s been used by everyone else in town, Read more…

It’s All About The Balls

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 04 Mar 2014 Comments: 0 Tags: ball fascination, balls, gerbil balls, KSFM, roulette wheel

If you think about it (and I do, late at night, in the dark, playing with my guns, updating my Enemies List) promotionally, great things come in round sizes.

Let’s discuss, shall we?

We’re in Show Business. If the lottery just had a fish bowl with some random numbers in it, it wouldn’t have as many people hovering in front of their TV at 9:59 with hands full of soon-to-be-worthless tickets they bought at the Kwik Trip with their kids bake sale money.

Think about it: before there was a prize wheel, there was roulette. As opposed to having a short line of bored people trying to spin and win a key chain from Exxon at their remotes, KSFM used to have a roulette wheel. They’d have 38 listeners over the course of 15 or 20 minutes put their names on squares and they’d spin for something decent like concert tickets. Read more…

Making Less Sound More

Paige’s top 10 selection of greatest radio promotions of all time

When The World Is Watching

When The World Is Watching

Have You Been Served?

Have You Been Served?

When Nature Hits, We Still Have Radio

Radio, as an industry, doesn’t seem to play well with others. Maybe it’s because we’re populated with people who were traditionally chosen last in 6th grade phy ed team activities.

Reality Check

One of my favorite and most surreal conversations was with a morning show last Fall as we prepared to set up and launch their inevitable food drive.

The OM had already acknowledged some concern that “There are going to be like 7 or 8 other food drives happening” but the morning guy was undeterred.

Showing The Flag

Anti-Social Media

Radio has, like we always seem to do, take something like social media and look at it with a very one dimensional vision: “Hey Bob, now we have another way to spam and annoy our audience.”

Terms That Need To Be Killed Off

As members of the esteemed Communications Field I don’t think it’s lost on anyone that we fall into traps, ruts, patterns and other lawn hazards when it comes to naming features.

It’s All About The Balls

If you think about it (and I do, late at night, in the dark, playing with my guns, updating my Enemies List) promotionally, great things come in round sizes.

Radio, as an industry, doesn’t seem to play well with others. Maybe it’s because we’re populated with people who were traditionally chosen last in 6^th grade phy ed team activities.