A Red Ryder BB Gun With A Compass In The Stock And This Thing That Tells Time and Other Things To Ask For For Christmas
It’s that time of year when God, proving that He has a sense of humor, will reach out to stations and ask “If there was something you really want that we could work into next year’s budget, what would it be?”
Obviously the answer is and shall always be, “Paige Nienaber as our Promotions consultant. I hear she’s great.”
A couple of years ago one of the PD’s that I consult reached out and asked me for something that would juice a little noise about the morning show, tr: do something that would get people going into work and asking their coworkers “Did you hear what happened on (morning show ) today?”
You really can’t beat a show that has set the bar so high that the audience feels that if they miss JUST one morning, they may have missed something exciting.
So I took a bit that has been basically 300 and 0 at the plate, re-tooled it and presented it. “What’s the pay off? What’s the out?” this guy asked me. I explained that there wasn’t either of those and that sometimes in life there isn’t a payoff and that the next morning the show would just return to business as normal as if nothing unusual had occurred. Said consultant wanted them to get on the air and admit that it was a bit. That’s when I suggested to the PD that we might just not want to do anything rather than do something that over-the-top stupid. He agreed.
One of the hotels that I regularly layover at in Minneapolis has all new front desk staff spend a day at the airport, familiarizing themselves with every element of the operation. They do this so when some stressed out women with three screaming kids calls from baggage claim at midnight and they lost her luggage and she’s not sure if she’s in the Humphrey or Lindbergh terminals, they can more effectively help her. What a concept. Because no one ever checks into an airport hotel after 10 pm who has had a good day.
CBS launched a station a couple of years ago that sent a personal note to every single person who liked them. It’s the simple stuff. Seriously.
Steve Woods at 94/9 friends every listener who friends him. Why? Why wouldn’t you? He sends them notes on their birthdays, congratulates them on jobs or babies and sends them notes of condolence when they’ve had a set-back in their life.
Back when Radio at least pretended that we cared about our listeners, it was standard to every December send a Christmas card to every listener who’d won that year. Personalized. Signed. Not some auto-generated spam that’s Facebooked to them. The first time I got a birthday message from Al Franken I was genuinely excited. And then I kind of realized I was in the database and some chip sent it to me. Read more…
One of my favorite Programmers is Mark Adams with iHeart in San Francisco. Mark’s one of those guys who is literally so smart that I’ve always been afraid to ask to see his SATs because I knew it would just ruin my day.
Mark was talking about new technologies and how Radio is so anxious to be cool and sit at the Jock Table at lunch that we glom on to these things like pilot fish and go overboard embracing that, and we kind of look like idiots because in a lot of regards, they’ve already been a fundamental in the lives of a lot of our listeners for months before we suddenly stumbled on them.
Fax machines, cell phones, pagers, the internet, my space, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, drones, Periscope. There are stations that are just now getting on board with Snapchat even though the Teens, who dictate the trends and never ever forget that, were all over it a year ago.
Don’t misinterpret me, we should take advantage of every new “thing” as a way to engage and connect with our audience, but also, to be competitive and relevant.
All new doohickies either become fundamentals of eventually questions on “Jeopardy”. Read more…
“Exciting and unpredictable!” That makes a great baseball game but if you see it on someone’s on-line dating profile, change your name and burn off your fingerprints. I’ve done “exciting and unpredictable” and one morning woke up and realized that I needed to leave town. Quickly.
I hastily put together a creative mailer to send out. Instead of marketing myself, I was selling my desk and all of its fine qualities. And because the desk’s owners were highly motivated to find it a good home, they’d even throw in a Promotion Director to go with it.
Bing. Bang. Boom. Printed up 250 and blindly mailed them to every station I could find.
If you doubt that God has a sense of humor, then consider that the woman I was fleeing was named “Charlotte” and the first truly serious nibble I got was from Kiss 102…in Charlotte. As Paula, the Business Manager at the station I was fleeing said, “This was meant to be.”
Best damn move I ever made. Read more…
It’s surprisingly hard to explain the concept of ‘cool’ to someone in Radio. Surrounded by celebrities, able to shame their former highschool peers with social media post after social media post of themselves with A List artists, let’s be honest: none of us would have gone into radio if we had been cool.
There are a few stations that I think I can, in 2015, legitimately stick that label on. One would be Cities 97 in Minneapolis. They’re the epitome of Cool. If they tried to be, then they wouldn’t be: Cool just IS. And it’s a fragile equation: attitude + music + content + events + talent = Cool.
You generally don’t see cool stations that do what other people are doing, ie: Dirty On The :30’s Read more…
The Carol Frey Theory Of Product Placement
When we last left Carol, she offered a treatise on cold weather marketing and how to maximize blizzards and other weather events.
Sadly, the fame of being featured on my blog was a little too heady for this suburban Minneapolis mom and soon she was hitting happy hours at Chilis and trying to capitalize and get free appetizers out of her on-line stardom.
Fortunately with the love of her family and friends to support her, Carol went off for 28 days of quiet reflection at Serenity Pines where she focused on challenges in her life.
She’s back and got out/was released just in time for the Minnesota State Hockey Tournament. You truly need to be in this corner of the upper Midwest to fully understand how large of a deal that it is. It’s literally a part of the culture of this state. It’s like The World Cup in Brazil, Friday night football in Texas, or cheap lap dances in Huntsville.
So I’m watching a game, and seated directly behind the guy who the sportscasters would go to between periods for commentary and coach interviews, were Mr. and Mrs. Carol. During the course of the game she got a mess ‘o screen time. I was just pissed that I hadn’t known or I would have gotten them in Cities 97 sweatshirts. Read more…
The downside to working at an amazing, ridiculously cool station early in your career is that, for probably a decade after you leave, you compare everything to that experience. “Well, you know, at WLOL the way we did it was…”
I’m sure that I was pretty obnoxious but eventually I moved on in life but retained the lessons from that gig.
We used to do sticker spotting and after barraging every home in the metro area with a mailer that included a bumpersticker, magically, one morning, seemingly 1 in 3 cars had one of our stickers on them. And so we hit the streets and five times a day spotted stickers and awarded cash.
My Mr. Miyagi, a guy named Tom, always had me be “Paige in van #14” when I called in. We only had one vehicle, so I asked him why and he said “Because it sounds bigger. Words are our secret weapon.”
And it’s true. Radio is not about minimalism, it’s about maximalism. About taking what we say and spinning it so that we appear larger than life. Read more…
If you read enough of these things you’ll pick up some common themes, like, Waffle House, “Clarissa Explains It All”, highway rest areas and ‘elements you see at GREAT radio stations’.
One of the things that you almost always see in a great radio station, is they miss nothing. Everything is potentially something they can take and have fun with. For 20 years that was WPGC in DC. They were so hyper-tapped in to that market that it was stoopid™.
Right now, as I’m typing this, the Seahawks just won a trip to Glendale and my email is clogging up with emails from Z-100 in Portland as we strategerize what they should be doing. I’ve seen stations that missed their local teams going to national championships. These people have jobs!! Isn’t that frightening?
A couple of weeks ago a story was trending nationally about a women in San Diego who happened to be on the toilet at work when an 8 foot python decided to exit after exploring the local sewer system. Read more…
I think you can really separate and weed out the Great Stations from the Not So Great Stations when you look at what they do when something like Sandy Hook occurs. Or, when you look at their promotional calendar two weeks before Christmas.
This is it. Our the mid-point of our Meat & Potatoes promotional season. Halloween into Thanksgiving into Christmas into New Years. One amazing opportunity after another after another to market the station, make money, create buzz and close out the year with a bang, not a thud.
I was following up with my client in Grand Forks, Z-94.7 and Nikki Rush sent me a really impressive schedule of contests and events and happenings for December. I replied with some kind of “Wow, that’s fantastic!” and she shot me back “I’d like to see more happening.. we have a couple weeks.”
I got a little misty for a second.
Radio used to be the creator or bits and “stuff that people talked about”. In 2000, the Ice Bucket Challenge would have been the brainchild of WBLI or Wild in Tampa.
You should really monitor the Jimmys, Fallon and Kimmel, every night. They get it. Their acknowledgement of Christmas would not be a “Here’s what to do in Houston this holiday!” list on their website.