CPR Promotions Blog - Page 4 of 11

The Helmer Johnson Theory Of Bone Throwing

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: morning show 10 Jul 2017 Comments: 0

Mancow was one of the oddest but best morning guys that I ever worked with. One of the things that impressed me was how he basically schooled himself in some kind of mental crash course, in everything “Bay Area”. We’ve all heard new talent from out of the market miss-pronounce a street or community name, but in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, there’s nationalities, neighborhoods…just a lot of things you can screw up and lose credibility.

Every market has that suburb that it’s all right to make fun of. Even the people there acknowledge that they live there but will semi-seriously qualify it as “I live in the nice part of Anoka.” Mancow was able to, the first weekend in San Francisco, zero in on Concord as THAT place. So creating bits around this East Bay community became part of the repertoire and the Concordians….loved it. Read more…

Burn After Reading

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio 14 Jun 2017 Comments: 0

If you ever get your ass handed to you, and I mean like in a brutal way, you hopefully learned from it. Because if you didn’t then it was a really wasted experience. While it was happening, yeah, it sucked. It was like being in a car crash in slow motion while having a sadistic dentist probe your cavities. And not even the ones in your teeth.

I went through this experience in the Twin Cities. We were the #1 station and had been the #1 station for several years. We were giant-like. And then KDWB brought in a new team and cleaned our clocks in less than a year. Read more…

Phenomenon And Transcending Formats

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 22 May 2017 Comments: 0

I can deal with assholes and I can deal with sleazebags and I can handle when promotions don’t go perfectly but the thing that just makes my head do the whole Star Wars Death Star Blowed Up Thing is when stations miss opportunities to market themselves.

And when I say “miss” I mean it in the context of not changing up the imaging, doing something on the morning show, doing some social media posts, maybe some web graphics or a weekend theme, or even just showing up for it.

The reason that a station in Chicago missed the Bears in the Super Bowl was that “Our CHR audience doesn’t care about football.” In Chicago. Maybe the biggest grouping of sports nuts on the planet. Read more…

The Dominoes Theory Of Promotions

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Promotions 01 May 2017 Comments: 0

I find myself again referring to a station that went from First to Worst. It was such a crashing failure that people literally would have had to sit down and say “Okay, let’s fuck this up.” It would be like driving McDonalds out of the burger industry: it would take effort.

The one constant over the years was “amazing promotions”. They always had something happening. “Something” could be a contest. It would be an event. It could be a stunt. It could be something stupid that the morning show was doing. It could be a reaction to an event or occurrence in the market place. But there was always something that the DJ’s could talk about.

As a Promotion Director, I was undoubtedly guilty of going to the extreme. It was a barrage of promotions. That’s never good and I knew that I’d done it again when someone from the air staff would come to me looking confused.

Whoops.

So, one of the Alpha stations sent me their calendar for the next three months and it was perfect. One thing ends, and the next thing begins. Over and over and over and over. No down time. Like dominoes. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Read more…

The Dang Factor

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio 12 Apr 2017 Comments: 0

There once was a station, a most amazing station, that was #1 in their format (Rhythm) against at least one competitor at any given time. They were even #1 when their signal sucked. It was such a great station that people would buy copper wire and wire their office so they could pick it up. Kids would tape it and share the cassettes at school.

And then, the new GM decided that he couldn’t sell the (ginormous) numbers because “You can’t sell ethnic numbers in (market).”

I think I may have even asked if he’d actually gone out and met the audience. Sure, they had Black listeners but just like the Black musicians who pretty much invented Rock in the 1950’s you had all the hip White kids. And their Hispanic numbers were through the roof. Their Black and Hispanic numbers combined were about 50%, which perfectly mirrored the market make-up. But this was lost on him and I’m not sure whether this is relevant but on Facebook I saw that he’s a Birther. Read more…

The “And Then” Theory Of Convoluted Contesting

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Contest 30 Mar 2017 Comments: 0

I’m a card carrying, dues paying, meeting attending member of I.L.A. ( I Love Acronyms). The station in Memphis did FLU Shots (Free Liquor Unlimited). The station in San Diego did SPF (Summer Prize Fun). Albany did FML (Free Music Live). But I detest K.I.S.S. or Keep It Simple Stupid.

Not that keeping it easy and simple-to-play is bad, but most PD’s f’ it up and dumb it down to being a stinking boring pile of pablum. Zzzzzzzz. So when one of the PD’s said in regards to a meet and greet backage for Taylor Swift “We’re just going to K.I.S.S. this”, I knew it was going to suck. Read more…

A Slight Exaggeration

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 10 Mar 2017 Comments: 0

There are so many metaphors that tie Radio to politics and even romance. And since some of these are fairly large, I guess they would be megaphors.

Politicians are prone to embellishing the truth. I know. It’s a shock. Do you need to sit down and collect your thoughts? They will maybe exaggerate a little to make their events or policies or successes seem even bigger or better or more successful than they might actually have been.

Why? Because sub-conciously people want to be affiliated with things that are larger and more popular than the competition. Or, at least have their choice validated.

The same goes for romance. I’m not going to tell the woman I met at Happy Hour at Chili’s that I drive a 1998 Ford Explorer with rust spots. I will probably tell her that I’m looking to upgrade my ride and am pitting two dealerships against each other to get me the best deal on a ’17 Escalade, and if they want my business, the rims had better be free.

I know a woman from my little corner of east central Minnesota whose ex-husband wooed her with his management job at Aveda and he was also enrolled at St. Thomas where he was working on a Masters in Business.

Uh…”management at Aveda” turned out to be in their distribution department (loading dock) and the St. Thomas thing was really some kind of highschool equivalency course. Whoops. He now drywalls and she got the kids.

Even the marketing of products is tweaked to improve or embellish their appearance. When I worked at Emmis in Minneapolis/St. Paul there was a photo studio on the level below us that specialized in menus and labels and other imagery of food. It was fun to hang out and they showed me the ropes in their kitchen on how to prepare a Perkin’s hamburger so that it looked bigger and juicier than it already was. It involved under-cooking, some coloring and lights.

How does that apply to us?

Well, we’re in the shopper comparison business too. Read more…

An Ode To James Garner

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Street Teamers 02 Mar 2017 Comments: 0

an-ode-to-james-graner-cpr-promotions

People who have known me for any length of time know that I would run across a crowded freeway for a bratwurst, I made my first million by creating and trademarking the term “Adult Super Store”, I actively search out and chronicle travel filth, and I’ll fight anyone who disagrees with me that “The Rockford Files” was the best damn TV show ever.

In fact, my Freshman year in college was in Los Angeles and on Day One, I borrowed a car from someone in the dorm to drive out to Paradise Cove and see the Rockford trailer. And…it was gone. Filming had cancelled before it was begun because of a contract dispute. I was crushed. Much like Angel when his Caddy, Lucille, was firebombed by the mob.

Oh. Yeah. I had a point.

In the movie “The Great Escape”, James Garner’s role was ‘the scrounger’. The person in the camp who was good at getting you what was needed. Stolen ID’s. Digging tools. Travel documents. He stole or permanently borrowed whatever he could scrounge for the escapers.

Great stations usually have a scrounger. That person on the staff who is so stupidly connected that they can get you whatever you need. Read more…

Promotions With A Little Arch

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Promotions 23 Feb 2017 Comments: 0

Twice in the last year I’ve found myself at international radio conferences and one of the things attendees will ask me, is to what do I attribute the staggeringly low participation rate in our on-air promotions.

“Because they suck” is just too vague so I try to explain the reasons I think we’ve over-thought and STILL dumbed down contesting so that no one cares.

TV has “game shows”. Big gaudy spectacles of noise and vibrant visuals that attract audiences of people to watch a select few who have gotten the call and some plane tickets to Los Angeles.

Radio has “contests” which are drab, uninteresting and immediately forgettable.

Disagree? Then try to explain why fewer than 1 in 10 listeners are compelled to pick up the phone and try to win $1000.

I was hired in 1991 by United Broadcasting in San Francisco to try and help this floundering ship called KSOL. After a few months, sitting in the GM’s office with the PD and Jerry Clifton, the consultant on the phone, Jerry declared “This station sucks. We need to blow it up.” And 7 days later Wild was launched.

Out of the gate we did fun, brash, attention-generating, cume-building promotions but, at some point, Clifton happened to be doing a market visit during a two week period when I’d put something that just wasn’t “wild” on the air.

Jerry: “Why is this contest on the air?”

Me: “To try to get people to listen?”

Jerry: “Well, it won’t because there’s no reason for it to be on the air.”

And he introduced me to his concept of a Promo Arch.

He said a great promotion is like a movie. There’s a beginning. There’s a middle. Stuff that’s unexpected could happen. And then there’s an end. And if you did it right, then there’s a sequel. Read more…

The Devaluation of The Dollar

Posted by: Paige Nienaber In: Business of Radio, Promotions 17 Feb 2017 Comments: 0

I want to apologize for the title of this blog. My digital person, Isabel, read some piece about how people with degrees in Economics are the new Money Demo, so she gave me a list of key words to work into our content. Like “gold standard”, “market fluctuation” and “adaptive expectations”.

I was going to call this “Only Radio…” as in “Only Radio…could take something as simplistic, yet, amazing, as Facebook and fuck it up. Honestly any 12 year-old should probably be running our social media because they understand that posting a photo of a Golden Retriever licking his genitals will get 8000% more reach than “What do you think of Austin Mahone’s new belt?”

One of the Townsquare clusters in Montana that I worked with posted a classified ad from the local paper of some woman shaming her son by selling his pickup truck because he’d been an idiot. The hits, views and reach were MORE than all of my top 10 market stations combined.

So, only Radio could take something as compelling as giving away cash and fuck it up as witnessed by the ridiculously low numbers of people who will participate in our promotions.