CPR Promotions Promotions Archives

A Tiny, Miniscule, Easy-To-Achieve Goal For 2020

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, morning show, Promotions 07 Dec 2019 Comments: 0

Here’s what you should do while everyone is cleared out and on vacation after Christmas; write “1%” on a sheet of paper, run off a bunch of copies and post it around the station. Why? Because that’s your goal for 2020. To get just 1% more of your listeners engaged, activated and playing your contests.

Now, I never pretended to be a mathematician, but, if only 4% of people will participate in Radio promotions, then having 5 freaking % of your listeners doing it would make you #1. Or, it certainly wouldn’t hurt you.

4%. How pathetic is that? If I took out an ad in the Forest Lake Times and said that I would be standing in the roundabout at Lake and Broadway at noon on Saturday and would award $1000 randomly to someone, it would look like Woodstock.

And yet, we can do $1000 16 times a day and can’t crack 4%.

So, as you shoot for the impossible 5%, work the problem backwards: what would we need to do to hit that number?

When Money Can Be More Than Money

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions, Uncategorized 03 Sep 2019 Comments: 0

We’re heading into Fall ratings and it’s an exciting time indeed. A time of begging, bribing, cajoling and forcing people to listen at insane appointment times in the hopes of increasing our listenership. And we’re so good at it that we get up to 4% of our audience to participate.

Now, I’m not a mathematician but if you could get…5% to play, wow. Wouldn’t you be #1?

1%. That’s all you need to do to be historic. So, what you need to do to grow your engaged contest players by one freaking little percent?

First step is to stop thinking like Radio People because whatever we’re doing isn’t that great.

The Time I Launched A Radio Station On An Airsickness Bag

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Promotions 22 Jul 2019 Comments: 0

I’ve begun to realize that as I get older, I tend to start stories with “So…”. As in “So…I reckon it was aught two and Caleb and I went up to the county seat to scutch flax for Widow Holmvig…”

So…I reckon it was aught six and I was consulting Infinity-soon-to-be CBS Radio in Denver. As often happens, the cluster found itself in a position where they needed to rebrand a station. It happens. And most of these projects are done with a press release, some new imaging and a promise of no talent with lots of commercial free music. It’s very exciting stuff and no one ever notices or cares.

The cluster was fortunate to have Keith Abrams as their OM and Keith understands that you rarely see great stations that didn’t have some bang to their launch. So, we conspired and wrote and created and crafted a fake format or “fauxrmat” for the first 72 hours of the new station. Something jarring and attention-getting that would make some noise so that when he dropped the REAL station on them, there would be some ears tuned in.

We decided that an All Chinese station would accomplish that. “Kung Pao” would be the brand and together we pounded out imaging and content for a website that would accompany the temporary station.

There was a great line in “The Sting” about how the most outrageous propositions are made more believable if you feed it to them in small doses (a tease) and you support it with the right actors and scenery. A realistic site was essential.

And then…someone at corporate whose main job was to send out press releases, got wind of it. Her fiefdom was basically to send out press releases and any Infinity station that dared to reach out to a local affiliate and say “We’re doing a dog wash on Saturday at the grocery store…” was going to have her wrath come done on them like a thousand thunderbolts.

She didn’t like the idea. She didn’t get it and with no Programming experience to back up her dislike of the scheme, she went to the top and it was squashed. Their launch was weak and within a year they rebranded again with the same music but a different moniker.

So…I reckon it was aught nine and I was hunkered down at an airport on the West Coast, about to begin an arduous journey with two flight changes, to get home to Minneapolis, and John Shomby with Max Media in Norfolk called: they wanted to blow up a station and start from scratch. Did I have any suggestions? Well, we’d just done an all strip club fauxrmat at another Max station and it had been so successful that the PPM numbers they pulled in 72 hours have, I don’t think, been matched in any of the later formats they’ve put on that dial position. I suggested Music For Dogs: with Arbitron now surveying dogs, the potential to grow their numbers 400% was there.

And then I mentioned Kung Pao. Boom. That was it. It had to be Chinese.

John got to work culling together a continuous loop of about two hours of Chinese music and I grabbed an airsickness bad and sketched out the site.

Actual airsickness bag from the launch of Kung Pao 100.5

When I landed in the Twin Cities, I typed it up to send off to Bel Boschi in Vancouver to create a site. The final product had fake banner ads and a “Listen In Real Time” button for streaming. Under the On-Air section were:

The Wake-Up Gang Of Four” 4 to 7 am

“At-Worker Paradise featuring More Music! More Productivity!” 7 am to 7 pm with Elvis Truwang

“Diddy Mao keeping your nights Kung Pao hot! From 7 to 10 pm”

“The Red Menace, DJ Che’ spinning Hot Hits From Havana, nightly, 10 pm to 1 am”

“Delilah from 1am to 4am”

“The Weekend Brigade” (photo four generic political prisoners)

Specialty Programming:

Khan Junior, the Cambodian Ryan Seacrest with entertainment dish from the Khmer Republic and beyond, Saturday nights from 8 to midnight

Sunday Morning Public Affairs:

4 am – 4:30 “Family Focus with Hope Daniels” May 5^th’s featuring One Child, One Country author Lily Tran

4:30 am to 5 am “The State Of Your City” May 5^th hosted by Karl Weimer discussing “Dividing The Wealth On Just One Paycheck”

5 am to 5:30 am “This Week Now” Our inside sources reveal what’s going to happen to whom and when.

6 am to 7 am “The Inspirational Moment Hour”

7 am to 8 am “Powerline with Brother John Rivers” (will be pre-empted if religious subject matter that violates policy, is aired.)

8 am to 12 noon Sundays, Manchurian Top 40

Also on the site:

Contests

“Take Your Bills And Divide Them Among The Community” begins with The Wake-Up Gang Of Four on Monday April 27. Send us your paycheck and listen for your name to get some of it back.

Diddy Mao has Communal Four Packs of tickets to “Elmo Grows Up” all next week. Listen for the gong to call and score your free passes.

Insurgent Club

Listen and earn points for privileges with the Kung Pao 100.5 Insurgent Club. Also receive emails with special offers from collective partners of the station. And it’s simple. Fill out the form and you’re entered.

Name:

Address:

Email:

Party Affiliation:

Family Members In Strategic Positions In The U.S. Military Industrial Complex:

Kidney or Renal Disorder?:

Please detail the activities of your neighbors. Leave nothing out. We will know if you do:

(And then above the submit button, it said “You Will Submit”)

KP-TV

The hottest in videos and digital entertainment!

(And then, a small notice that said “This content is currently being screened by the radio stations Chief Political Officer. Please check back for updates”)

Contact

Party Leader, Vonneva Carter [email protected]

Chairman, John Shomby [email protected]

Director Of The Ministry Of Technical Development, Paul Campbell [email protected]

Propaganda Minster, Nadine Pannicia [email protected]

While Bel created a site along with scrolling testimonials: “This is GREAT. It’s all we access on the radio now. Joel on-line in Denver”, “Love my Kung Pao! Cindy in VB”, “You guys rock and roll! Kevin and Carter in Chesapeake”, “The Navy at Little Creek wants another order of Kung Pao!”, “The Foreign Studies Department at Norfolk State is tuned in and turned on”, “You’re on in the lockerroom. The Tide”, “ Love it. Mark in Newport”, “More. Must have more. Dan in Great Bridge”, “Dian in Kempsville has joined the revolution”, “Indian River runs red with 100.5” and “Finally, the hot Chinese music I could only hear on the web, in freaking Norfolk! Tracy”, I wrote imaging, John built the play list and we prepared for launch.

This was all done in complete and total secrecy. Only a few people in the building even knew what was coming. The following Wednesday the station began to run a message from Max Media President Eric Mastel outlining Radio’s ability to change with the times and the continuing shifts in music tastes, promising a significant announcement on Friday at 5 pm, when this recorded message began to run TOH for the next two days:

“My name is John Shomby and I am Operations Manager for Max Media/Virginia Beach. As we enter 2009, Radio finds itself in an interesting, yet exciting period. In its existence. Radio has been a viable medium for over 80 years because of it’s ability to change to reflect the times and the ever-changing tastes and lifestyles of it’s audience. A new era has dawned for the industry and once again we must evaluate where we are and where we are going. With iPods and other music delivery services now available, Radio must continue to change to meet the times. Earlier this year, our parent company, Max Media undertook the most ambitious project that this industry has ever seen. With the help of Harris Research, the company launched an intensive research project. Hundreds of focus groups were hosted. Ten of thousands of phone interviews were conducted. A direct mail questionnaire was sent nationally to over 1.8 million radio listeners like you. And then the arduous project of looking at the numbers and seeing what they mean and where they point us began. And today, with Norfolk/Viringia Beach as its first market, Max Media is poised to begin the next generation of terrestrial Radio formats. The research is in and the numbers are irrefutable. The large gaping formatic hole that has been all but ignored? Chinese Country Music. This is a very exciting time and we are both humbled and honored to be at the forefront of this new wave of music programming. So please welcome to Virginia, the first of what will soon be a worldwide musical revolution. The new Chinese Country sound of Kung Pao 100.5. (Gong) Let the music begin!”

As we’d expected TV and all matters of press descended on the station in droves, where they were invited in to film and dine on a catered Chinese meal. Was the company serious? Were they really going to play Chinese music? Near a huge military installation?

There’s a trick to lying to the media and the first secret is DON’T LIE TO THE MEDIA. Because some day, some time, somewhere down the line, your night guy is going to be in a chatroom…and the next morning your station parking lot will be a sea of satellite dishes. And they will get the call letter right.

John Shomby handled it deftly and hinted that there was more, allowing them in on the joke but without delivering the punchline. Now on the “inside”, the TV stations played along. Even the New York Daily News was intrigued.

While he was doing that, I was messaging, as a concerned patriot, every conservative talk radio host I could find and they bit. They bit HARD. By the next morning these outraged citizens were doing all of our work for us and telling anyone that could read or listen that the red menace had arrived on our shores. When it got a story in the UK and a TV report in Panama, I knew we’d done well.

My two favorite memories of that weekend? Scott Sands emailing me from his desk in Indianapolis, concerned about all of the down tempo instrumentals. And Eric Mastel, President of Max Media, going into a coffee shop…and it was playing.

On Sunday afternoon a vague message began to run directing people to 7 am on Monday for another cataclysmic announcement, when Eric Mastel returned to the airwaves.

“It is highly embarrassing for me to come out, just days after trumpeting the launch of what we perceived to be a strongly desired musical niche in the market, and tell you that we screwed up. First, and I can’t stress this enough, never, ever, hire a consultant who posts a flyer on the corkboard at Piggly Wiggly with those little tear-off phone number dealies at the bottom. And second, yes; we did undertake one of the largest music research projects ever. But you know, getting the data is one thing. Understanding it is another. All those numbers, well, they kind of blurred together after awhile. And I was never good in math. Plus we were looking at them upside down. And there was alcohol involved. Any way, we revisited the research data and found that, as opposed to Chinese music, there is an overwhelming need for a CHR/Top 40 station in Norfolk/Virginia Beach. A station that plays today’s hits and balances it out with fun and compelling content between the songs and on the website. Please welcome Hot 100.5 into your homes, offices and cars. And please accept my apology and promise that we will never do these big research projects again. Thank you. I’m now off for the rest of the day to have my head examined.”

And they launched into Hot 100.5, a station that a decade later is still going strong.

Strong stations usually had strong launches. Kung Pao? Strong and spicy. As with the Wilds in SFO and Tampa, DECADES later people remember how they launched. Walk around Norfolk and Virginia beach ten years later, mention “Kung Pao 100.5” to random people and you’ll get a smile and “They got me.”

We Are (Almost) The Champions And Other Great Moments In Playoff History

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Contest, Promotions 07 Jun 2019 Comments: 0

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!”

Caller 10,000: The Time MTV Gave Away A Date With Prince

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Contest, Promotions 16 May 2019 Comments: 0

Back when I was in college and broke, we used to go to game show tapings in LA because, well, they were free, they’d often feed you, there were door prizes and with some shows there were actual chances to be ON the show. Like “The Price Is Right”.

So, me and some of my dormmates made the trek down to CBS Television City to stand in line to get in, and while we waited, some crew came along and one-by-one gave us eacg a quick interview and a name tag.

We were guys. We were 18-20, so there’s a certain air of feigned coolness that comes with that age and gender. They asked us a couple of questions and moved on. None of us were chosen.

Fast forward 20 years and my niece, who was broke and in college, was standing in line to do the same thing. Her roommate who was peppy and bubbly and just so gosh darn ebullient that it would make you sick…got the call to come on down and she went home with a new car.

Huh. Stoic cool guys get ignored and a bouncy, happy, barely-in-control young woman gets put on national TV.

Of course. Why wouldn’t she? TV game shows would be boring if everyone was polite and reserved. They want screamers and so should we.

Think about it: 4% of people will play our silly games, so what real reason is there for us to do them? For the winners and the promos. For the excitement they interject between Cardi B and the 4th new Ariana Grande drop this month. Read more…

“The Mary Richards Party” Explanation For Promotional Disasters

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Promotions 01 Apr 2019 Comments: 0

Back when ‘Hitmakers’ was a thing, I wrote a weekly column for the popular trade magazine. And then it went out of business so I wrote a column for another popular trade ‘Gavin’, before it too closed up and locked their doors. Seeing a trend?

For the Halloween issue of ‘Hitmakers’ I did a piece on scary promotions or promotions that turned bad. I reached out to a dozen Radio people and got their stories for the piece and included a half dozen disasters that I had been associated with. I gotta say, it was pretty funny.

My personal favorite was the station on Long Island that had filled a car with hundreds of miniature pumpkins: guess how many pumpkins were in it and win the car. Now, we all know from experience that our Halloween creations can get soft pretty fast. Imagine them in a car, with closed windows, often in the sun…yeah. They ended up having to rip out and replace the interior.

Kevin Carter with ‘Hitmakers’ forwarded me an anonymous fax that the publication had received from a reader. And said reader was mocking with extreme disdain, the article: “I’ve been doing Promotions for 20 years and have never had one of these so-called disasters!”

The next week I started my column with a message to the faxer: Perhaps you’re not trying hard enough. Read more…

Bit Marketing, or, Promotions With No Budget

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Contest, Promotions 10 Feb 2019 Comments: 0

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.

Lights, Camera…Movies

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 28 Dec 2018 Comments: 0

We can overthink prizing and get caught up such exciting and needle-freezing contests as The $1000 Free Money Text.

The Wolf in Greensboro gave out Twinkies when there was a Twinkie shortage and The Phones Melted™. Ditto with Power in Atlanta with Patti Labelle’s sweet potato pies and The Phones Melted™. KLUC in Las Vegas with turkeys the day before Thanksgiving? The Phones Melted™. Townsquare Media in Boise did haircuts and The Phones Melted™. B-103.9 in Ft. Myers decided to give out ten packs of $1 scratch off lottery tickets and The Phones Melted™.

And then you have movie tickets.

I got desensitized to free movies by the mid-1980’s. It seemed like we were doing a screening every few weeks. A decade later my neighbor asked if I could get a pair of tickets to some Harrison Ford movie from my client here in the Twin Cities. They sent four tickets and 19 years after the fact Kent still mentions the time he and his wife and another couple went to Mall Of America to see a movie for free.

Uncle Paige’s Annual Christmas Tale

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Promotions 12 Nov 2018 Comments: 0

Gather ‘round kiddies and let your good old Uncle Paige tell you a scary Christmas story.

“A scary Christmas story Uncle Paige?”

Yes Erin. Climb up here. The rest of you crowd around.

Now all of you get real close and I’ll tell you a story. A sad story about a radio station that didn’t understand the true meaning of Christmas.

It was Christmas 1993 and your Uncle Paige was flying home the weekend before the holidays from the station in New York. I’d just spent five weeks dealing with some really stupid people and my Christmas spirit? Well, time was running out and I just didn’t feel very Christmassy. My cab fought an ice storm all the way to Laguardia and once I was in the terminal and dealing with angry, rushed New York travelers, it didn’t put me in any better of a mood. Read more…

The Time I Almost Got Fired Because Of Prince

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Contest, Promotions 07 Jun 2018 Comments: 0

“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.