First, with rare occasions such as golf and cologne, less is in fact not more. One of my favorite Clear Channel GM’s referred to that pogrom as “Our self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

When teaching Street School and discussing signage at events I always remind the promo kids that there are thousands of words in the English language that can be arranged like Scrabble tiles to create millions of sentences. But the sentence, “Tim, I was at the Katy show and you put up too many banners!” does not exist in the English language.

We need to be “big” and sound “big”. And to do that, sometimes we just need to be creative.

I’m a fan of semantics, theater, smoke, mirrors and even smoke ‘n mirrors.

Maybe my first experience with playing around with truth was when I was a van drive for WLOL in Minneapolis circa 1985-1986. (I was 11 and Emmis had notoriously lax hiring practices.) We had blitzed the market with a direct mail piece that included two bumper stickers, and magically one day, seemingly 1 in 2 cars had an ‘LOL sticker on them.

So we started a campaign of spotting cars and pulling them over to win $99. We did 2 winners in AM drive, one in the middays and two in PM drive. When I was out I was always “Paige in Spotter Van #14’. We only had one station vehicle but even the most casual listener would have been left with the impression that we had fifty vans on the streets.
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