In 1989, after an extremely fun run at WLOL in the Twin Cities, I decided to venture out. I’d been fortunate to work for two outstanding Marketing Directors, Tom Gowan and Dan Seeman. They might not have known it but I was a sponge and was absorbing everything that they taught me. And in July ‘89, it was time to take my knowledge out for a test drive. I designed a creative mailer that offered people a Promotion Director if they bought a desk and credenza. This went out to literally every station on the planet and WCKZ/Kiss 102 in Charlotte was the first to respond. I was breaking up after 5 years with a coworker named Charlotte, so this seemed meant to be.
Kiss 102 was owned by Beasley, which had just paid $83 million for K-Earth so my budget was $300 a month. Total. I’d just come from a station that dropped $100,000 a book so this was a bit of a shock. I thought I might get the bends. But…you can’t stop doing promotions because you don’t have money. It just forces you to be creative.
It was a heady time. Erik Bradley and Mark Shands were doing the music and it was tight. I’ve heard from so many people who passed through who remarked that it was one of the best sounding stations they’d ever heard.
We had the future Jo Jo Wright doing nights. He had numbers that would blow your mind. And then there was my ally and a tremendous resource: Chris Remme who was one of the best National Sales Managers to ever shlep a spot. She was an archeologist for revenue and together we took lame Sales requests and turned them into huge promotions.
One of these clients was Van Camp’s Beanee Weenees. In the Spring of 1991 they dropped about $150,000 on the station over a 90 day period. It was a Traffic nightmare. (the spot averaged twice per stopset and was a version of The Name Game: “Beannie beanie, bo beenie, fo fana fana, fo feenie, me mi, mo meanie, Beanie! Weenie, weenie weenie, bo weenie…” The spot ran so often that I actually created something called The Beanee Weenee Dance which involved pulling my pants up to my nipples and gyrating like Phil Collins in the ‘Easy Lover’ video.) And obviously, they wanted a promotion. And of course it was some abortion created by an agency that would have had people calling in and answering trivia questions on the air about pork and beans.
Gold, Jerry, gold!
Chris, like you would do with a child, “redirected” them, because obviously, we weren’t going to do that.
“But that’s what the client wanted!” Yup, and I’m sure there were stations that did it verbatim and that sound you heard was thousands of listeners fleeing those stations during the contests. I would never have the audacity to go into Wendy’s and tell them how to make a burger, yet Wendy’s will come to us and tell us how to do promotions. Please see my earlier “Letters To Dave” piece.
Chris and I came up with a contest that secured the money and also maintained the integrity of the airwaves: we backed money out of the buy and through a client (ie: a major price break) we bought a car. We then filled the car with 28 cases of Beanee Weenees and the goal of the promotion was to guess how many weenies were in the Beanee Weenee Mobile.
This is the stuff that you can’t make up.
In a can of Beanee Weenees, there are either 9 or 11 pieces of hot dog. Never 7 or 10 or 12. (By the way, those numbers are what I remember all these years later. I also have false memories about Ms. O’Brien in 6th grade…)
With those numbers and the number of cans, we were able to establish a target number of weenies.
Over the next 60 days the car was taken on a tour of grocery stores and put on display. Because of the diminutive size of the Beanee Weenee Mobile, we could pull it into the store via the electronic front doors that could be scissored open. The cases of Beanee Weenees were transported separately so that someone could get in the car and drive it. Once the car was in the store, it was loaded with the weenies and locked up.
Any time you can get the brand front-and-center at check-out at a grocery store, that’s just a bonus.
The contest was simple: look in the car, do some mental math, and on an entry form write down your guess. The closest without going over would be the winner.
Over two months we accumulated an insane number of entries and after each grocery store appearance, Chris and I would take them back and dump them out on the conference room table and start poring through them, looking for entries that were close to the magic number.
At the end of sixty days we had seven people who had gotten the same guess, just short of the actual number, and invited them to a store for a drawing.
The afternoon before the final draw, the agency called from New York; “We want a bee for the event!” A bee? “The Beanee Weenee Bee!”. There was no such thing before or since but we dutifully tracked down a bee costume in Charlotte and the next day a limo delivered my (“long suffering” is assumed) wife, dressed as a bee.
The drawing was a success. The winner was happy. The losers weren’t too pissed, we’d finagled great visibility in high traffic locations for a couple of months and we’d made Beasley Broadcasting a ton of money.
But with most people, that would be where the story ends. I’m not like most people and please kill me if I ever am. So we were left with 28 cases of Beanee Weenees. The store room at the station was already filled with Corn Nuts and Payday candy bars from other National sales promotions via Chris, so the Weenies joined a dozen cases of Red Stripe Beer that were left over from a charity volleyball tourney and sitting on my apartment balcony.
Beer and beans: a cardiologists wet dream.
Just a month after the end of the Beanee Weenee Mobile contest, Jerry Clifton reached out and asked if I wanted to work at his new client in San Francisco. And off we went…Ann driving her car and me at the wheel of a Ryder truck pulling my car…filled to the ceiling with Beanee Weenees and Red Stripe.
Sadly social media didn’t exist in 1991 or someone at a truck stop in Wyoming would have gotten a million clicks on their image of the idiot with the car filled with beans.
And the upside? San Francisco is a marginally expensive place to live and I was set for dinners for, well, months. Good times.
I was pretty much weenied out for the next 30 years but in 2023 was at Cub Foods and there they were, in the Carcinogen Aisle. I heard their siren song, dropped $2 and went home to feast. What I learned is that being broke and living in a ridiculously expensive apartment makes everything taste better.
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