CPR Promotions Blog - CPR Promotions

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…

Press Releases For Dummies

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio 15 Sep 2018 Comments: 0

I was trading emails with a Promotion Director. Her station had just pulled off a killer bit. She asked for some help with writing a press release because she’d never written one before. And that’s pretty common. We kind of got sidetracked on this along the way. It used to be part of the gig. Now it’s a niche skill at most stations.

First off, we need to remind ourselves why we do most everything we do; to get press. (And to meet girls) And that’s kind of the whole object of “promotions” anyway; to get people talking about us. So you can’t just automatically assume that Bob over at TV 20 is going to be listening and hear that you’re marrying puppies on the air tomorrow. Thus, The Press Release.

Like Latin, the art of writing press releases is a dying language. But even more then that, you can’t just assume that sending Bob (over at TV 20) a press release is going to assure they’re covering the puppy wedding. This is an art: writing, following up, and finding other ways of making sure that you get the coverage you so badly need and clamor for. You know how many bogus press releases you get every day? Multiply that by ten and you might have an idea what someone at a newspaper or TV station has to wade through each and every day.
Read more…

The Audience’s Got Talent

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Uncategorized 04 Aug 2018 Comments: 0

Radio has always been adept at playing off of TV trends. When “Survivor” broke out as a hit in 2000 we used it as springboard to a myriad of promotions that locked listeners in bathrooms or cars or stuck them on roller coasters. And it was good.

In 2006, Idol debuted and that begat a slew of localized talent competitions. Some were good. Some were like bad karaoke nights at the VFW. The actual best that I witnessed first-hand was Saginaw Idol that was done by WIOG: there was some serious talent in the room. As a celebrity judge I had to go and ruin it by giving my deciding vote to a dueling piano player, which is some kind of egregious sin in Amateur Talent Circles. Whoops.

And then…we just kind of walked away and conceded musical talent shows to television, which seems kind of stupid. We are the music medium. We have some cred.

“The X Factor”, “Idol”, “The Voice”, “America’s Got Talent”, even “The Next Top Model” is a form of talent show, and TV wouldn’t be running these in heavy rotation is there wasn’t an audience for them. There’s even a talent show for kids.

So there-in lies a big gapping hole that a station could fill. 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.

The ’10 Questions A Day’ Theory Of Street Teaming

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, morning show, Promotions, Street Teamers 15 May 2018 Comments: 0

I don’t think anyone is not at least remotely familiar with the soul crushing experience of sitting on hold for 30 minutes and finally being connected with “John from customer service” and being told that he doesn’t have the answer to your question. I mean, that’s kind of his job, right?

And it doesn’t have to be trying to get something fixed, it can just be getting a simple answer to a question about a product or a service or a schedule or a timeline.

We kind of forget that the street team, are in 2003 terms, our Directors of First Impressions. They are far more likely to be approached and asked a question about the programming or promotions of a radio station than anyone else on the staff. So it kind of behooves them to have the answers. Read more…

Double Your Ratings In 2018

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Promotions 08 Apr 2018 Comments: 0

On the advice of my counsel, the best darn lawyer with the kiosk at the Walmart in Forest Lake, I’m going to add that mileage may vary, and that this does not include tax, dealer fees, plates and undercoating.

But, using rudimentary math, it would figure that if we can get more than 4% of people to play our contests and maybe even get that number up to, say, 8%, then we’ll be doing pretty well.

There’s a reason we can’t get that number over 4% and that’s because most of the contests that we clutter the airways with are really just wallpaper. I would categorize most group contests that way. They’re just….there. They’re not compelling, they don’t play to anybody other than the 4% of people we have hyper focused on and they rarely accentuate or build your stationality.

So how could you possibly get that number above 4%? Read more…

Revisiting The Promotional Genius of MTV

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Contest, morning show, Promotions 16 Mar 2018 Comments: 0

There’s no doubt that there’s a generation of Radio People who the significance of the first decade of MTV, would be totally lost on them. That’s cool. I get it. Ed Sullivan and Wolfman Jack were kind of lost on me. I got the cultural significance and the effect affect they had on my older brothers but the true impact and why? I didn’t grasp.

I was actually late on stumbling on it. I’d heard about it, people were talking about it, but if you lived in the last corner of Portland, Oregon to get wired for cable, you were kind of screwed. So it wasn’t until I was 21 and doing Spring Break with some friends in Breckenridge that I was able to binge on it for more than about two videos. My memories of that week are clouded and we’ll leave it at that, but it feels like “Come On Eileen” (poor Eileen’s parents) ran in heavy rotation, or, about every 9 minutes.

MTV was basically Radio. But with a visual. The programming was based on Radio. The people who created it and 4 of the five first VJ’s were all from Radio. JJ Jackson BROKE LED ZEPPLIN IN THE US. Mark Goodman had been at WMMR and WPLJ and when the music video channel started, sent a four page memo to one of the VP’s where he outlined, among other things, “The audience of MTV will not be like the average TV audience. In many ways, they will be more musically aware than many of the people involved in this project.” Kind of sounds like the Millennials, which is an audience that communicates visually. Read more…

The Kent Dorfman Guide To Getting A Gig

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Interns, Promotions, Street Teamers 14 Feb 2018 Comments: 0

When I go around and do Street school with the radio stations every spring and train in their promo teams, one of the things that I highlight at the very beginning, is that when you meet somebody on the street they interviewing you for the job of being their favorite radio station. There are 1 million books on how to get a job and how to do interviews but the one thing that they all seem to agree on is that you have about eight seconds to get the deal done. Eight seconds to get their attention in a positive way and if you achieve that, you will have their attention for the rest of the interview.

That’s really good criteria for when you’re trying to get a job. If there is one position open and 800 people driving hard for the hoop, what are you going to do to be that person, that applicant, that will get their attention for more than eight seconds?

The Cool Carl Paranski Theory Of Cool

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: morning show, Promotions, Street Teamers 19 Jan 2018 Comments: 0

There was a morning guy who I was working with who I think might have thought he was in a different field. It wasn’t just the name or the hair or the bio or the photos: it was the whole presentation. He was that kid in high school who was trying hard to be cool.

With age comes wisdom. And liver spots.

Looking back at high school you realize that really, there were maybe one or two people who were actually cool. And they were cool because they didn’t try to be cool. They were kind of above all that stupidity. They were just themselves and if you didn’t like them, well, that’s alright.

There were some people who were cool for their accomplishments like sports or debate (my mom said I was super cool because I was able to effectively defend the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act) but the shine wore off.

Cool? That’s just something you are.