Promotions is often the Art of being relevant, topical and in-the-moment. Mancow blocking the Bay Bridge? It would have just been a mean-spirited prank if it hadn’t occurred the day after Bill Clinton fouled up air traffic west of the Mississippi when he got his hair cut while sitting on Air Force One at LAX.

Between Chases Calendar of Events and social media, it’s pretty easy to gauge what’s trending and what kind of stupid holiday like “Talk Like A Pirate Day” might be fodder for doing something with it.

And sometimes you don’t even need matrices and algorithms to know that there’s an opportunity, like, when, everyone in town is losing their minds about your team making it to the playoffs. That’s a given. You would think.

First, you need to acknowledge the Hard Truth that no one can tell you what you did for contesting last week. But come to the Twin Cities, find someone born after about 1972 and just say “Let’s play word association, okay? Tom Bernard and the 1987 World Series…” and a large percentage of them will without pause say “The light happy music!”

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I’m sitting in a hotel in Sacramento with the flu and dealing with a station where they just lost all their cash contest money for 2019 (until they hear otherwise) and they are losing their minds. The GM is old school, he knows it sucks but I think he sees it as I do: they’ll probably do better contests now. Why? Because they’ll have no choice BUT to.

1. 4% of people play contests.
2. The only real reason to do them is to make exciting promos and create buzz and be topical.

So…I went from a station that had $200,000 a quarter for marketing to launching Wild in SFO against literally the most amazing station I’d ever heard, with no cash. $1100 a month for “stuff” and no traditional marketing money period.

We beat them in two years. Actually a year if you based it on word of mouth. Arbitron was always six months behind.

1. We identified their weaknesses which were the streets, the community (but they were GOOD with that stuff), bumperstickers and that was pretty much it. We took “trips” away from them pretty quickly.

2. Pretty much “Will this get people to talk about us?” was part of every decision so we did a LOT of stunts.

It was Bit Marketing. One bit into another bit into another bit into another bit into another bit into another bit over and over and over and over.

Anything in terms of prizes came from the indy, movie companies, tv networks and clients. Labels wouldn’t take our calls.

All methodologies were based on “What can we soak out of this for 14 days?” Few contests went longer than 14 days because KMEL did long promotions that dragged on for a month and we could hit with a trip to Vegas, followed by a movie, followed by a highschool bit in that period in addition to topical weekend contests. It made them sound old.

So, think about:

1. How can we have the best contest promos?
2. Winners promos (The Price Is Right would suck if they edited out the screaming people)
3. Community. All the money and ratings machinations in the world will never beat a radio station with an emotional connection to the listeners. KS95 in the Twin Cities? They’ve got an emotional connection to the audience which is why they’ve been a monster for so many years.
4. Look at the calendar. There can’t be down time between promotions. If there is, fill with some kind of ticket or create a great-ass tease.

A bit could be a morning show bet about the Super Bowl into a day of pet adoptions with four days or promoting leading up to it, into a weekend theme, into a Valentines photo gallery promotion, into the morning show using a psychic to match up people for a date, into a club night, into a week of movie tickets, into a week of concert tickets, into promoting a St. Patrick’s event….you get the idea.

It’s fun to watch the competition, locked into a national contest, just get pummeled with promotions. And that’s Bit Marketing.

“Do you want to follow the rules or do you want to win?”

Being able to bitch and complain about our legal departments is almost a rite of passage, a badge of honor; something that can allow us to one-up our radio peers, i.e: “You think your company is bad? They’re nothing compared to ours….”

And there is no question that they often give us plenty of fodder to work with. But there’s a group of people out there people like Michael Martin or Rick Thomas, who if you say “United Broadcasting” will get that tiny, almost imperceptible post-piss shiver.

If you believed the lore that was doled out at corporate meetings, the founder was an innovative, albeit insane man who would hold meetings in phone booths, and yes it’s possible that tin foil was involved. But only a truly insane man in the 1950s would have realized that there was a place in the marketplace for “Black Radio”. Thus became United Broadcasting with a network of stations from Baltimore and Atlanta to Los Angeles and San Francisco. And when he finally died and went off to the loony bin in the skies he left his heirs with a group of radio stations that they wanted absolutely nothing to do with… except for the profits. So the company was turned over to a consortium of lawyers to run the thing and mail checks to the family.

Sure your company has lawyers but imagine if your company was run by lawyers? That was United Broadcasting. The most simple of tasks required a 17 page form be filled out and sent to Bethesda, Maryland for revisions and rewriting. So it was no surprise that almost all of their stations were getting euphemistically gutted in the ratings. I once ran a legal promo that was a minute and 44 seconds for a simple Coca-Cola promotion based around the Summer Olympics. That’s some great Radio.

One of the reasons that Wild in San Francisco was actually winning as opposed to their other radio stations was that we are on the West Coast and they were on the East Coast, and there was a certain point in the day when we knew that they wouldn’t be listening. It was no surprise that at the corporate meetings we were awarded number 14 out of 14 stations in the corporate Legal Compliance awards category. (I’m not joking)

Spending 3 to 4 hours a day filling out forms was a tough environment for somebody like me to operate. Time spent filling out forms, often for the fifth or sixth time, as opposed to time finding ways to beat the competition, was soul sucking.

I don’t think I ever realized how truly competitive I was until I got to KSOL, soon to be Wild 107, and went up against one of the greatest radio stations ever : KMEL/San Francisco. I looked at everything as a battle to be won. Morning show contests. Remotes. Appearances at concerts. And weekend contests.

So it came to be that I found myself driving home on a Friday afternoon at 6:50 after launching a weekend contest of movie tickets for something called “Blame It On The Bellboy” featuring cinematic superstar Bronson Pinchot. I tuned over to KMEL and heard them doing Prince tickets every hour. They were winning. And that was unacceptable.

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