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CPR Promotional Check-Up - Nov 30, 2021
November 30, 2021
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Weekend Contesting For December
Weekend contesting is kind of a Lost Art. Weekends are always the time you can swerve off the highway, get away from whatever your big A promotion is and be topical or relevant with whatever is happening in your market or the world. 106.1 Kiss-FM in Dallas is one of the stations that still, consistently, does great weekend themes. Ditto with Live in Portland, KJ103 in OKC and Kiss in Albany.
We spend a big portion of the year stretching premise and trying to get creative with our weekend contesting. So how sad is it to suddenly have four weeks of easy themes and imaging to play with…and do a Free Music Weekend. Most of these you can stick any prize in. You just want a methodology that reflects the lifestyle of your audience: and right now it’s the holidays.
This is as good of a recollection of every holiday weekend that I can recollect. Then you just work with what you’re able to pull off in terms of live calls or texts. Really? It’s just about the imaging.
No Prize Left Behind Joey Tack at Hot in Knoxville channeled his inner Sarah Maclachlan for this masterpiece.
Psychic Santa This requires you to cut 20-25 bits ahead of time. You have a psychic mall Santa in the studio. People call in, he looks into his crystal snowball and “sees” them using their prize, ie: “You are surrounded by people. It’s dark. The smell of popcorn is heavy in the air. You’re watching a giant talking beaver. Did you drop acid? Wait…no…you’re…hold on…it’s getting clearer…you’re at a movie theater watching “Ghostbusters.” You don’t know what you win until Psychic Santa tells you.
Ghosts Of Christmas Past Nothing more then a music weekend where you spike in #1 hits from past Decembers. Maybe have a “ghost of Christmas Past” introduce the song.
Not Available In Stores This is a familiar tag on TV and Radio spots this time of year. If you have tickets or something else that is available only by winning, then get cheesy with the promo and parody some of these awful commercials.
Caroloke Get a caller, start a Christmas carol, stop it and they have to finish singing the line.
Bad Santa Having the character of an angry, ticked off, laid off, drunk mall Santa would be fun to spice up the imaging. You win whatever he gives you before he yells at you to get off his lap and “get the Hell outta here.” Done as Arnie The Angry Elf at Magic in Colorado Springs.
Elves On Strike Needed? An intern and a tank of helium. The premise? The elves at one of the malls have gone on strike and you’ve hired them to work the phones until the labor dispute is worked out. A vibe weekend. Who cares what the prize is.
Messages For The Troops A couple of stations like 102 Jamz in Orlando have done this for the 4th of July. They’ve opened up the phones and recorded people’s messages to the troops. They then burn CD’s and ship them over. You could also have family/friends dedicate hours of music to specific soldiers and send the file to him/her.
Alone For The Holidays First, try not to use the word “single”. That term has a stink on it. But maybe you do the cue to call as an older woman saying “Honey, when are you going to find yourself a nice boy and settle down.” Do prizes like one ticket to a movie, dinner for one, a video to watch at home on a date night when you should be out, and maybe a CD from a recently divorced artist. If you have a Jingle Mingle club night, maybe a pass to that.
The Best Christmas Present EVER Unwrap commercial-free hours of music. A music feature weekend. But dress it up a bit with the imaging and promos.
Keep The Receipt Whatever you give away, include a receipt. In case they want to return it to the station for it’s cash value. (No matter what you give away, the cash value should be the dial position, ie: $1.02)
Holiday Film Festival The name is awful. But the premise is good. This is the biggest movie going time of the year. Get gift cards from a Cineplex. But, of course, you don’t say that. You say, “We’ll give you tickets to ANY movie you want to see.”
Christmas Bonus An opportunity for listeners to call in and talk about how cheap their bosses are. Present all your contesting as being “Christmas bonuses” to the audience for being such good, hard-working and loyal listeners.
Batteries Not Included Doesn’t matter WHAT you’re giving away. Include some batteries. Because when you need them most, you can never find them.
Ex Mess One of the things about the holidays? The mess. It looks like the Superdome after a hurricane at my house on the 26th. Give away Zoomba’s or whatever the heck those robot vacuum cleaners are.
Tree Jacking Just taking the designated caller and giving them a tree sucks. You need a premise. Like KLAX where they snuck across the fence to the neighbor's house every hour and cut down one of her backyard trees. And then snuck back over to the station. She was old and deaf so the chainsaw didn't wake her from her nap.
Stocking Stuffers The whole idea of promotional items is to give people something with your logo that they'll hold on to for years. Key chains and crap like that ends up in a drawer or garbage can almost immediately. For the Holiday season you should invest in logoed stockings and ornaments. These are GREAT prizes and the winners will keep them for years. In fact, every on-air giveaway that you do during the Christmas season should include these two items. Have the jock "take the stocking down off the mantle" and dump it out on the air. Concert tickets, t-shirts, movie passes...anything could be in the stocking. Just like on Christmas morning. Of course you'll want to occasionally throw in a lump of coal, some socks from Grandma, and one of those things that you shake up and it snows. They called the contest Stocking Stuffers when WPGC did this
An On-Air, All Weekend Christmas Party My favorite weekend contest from four years ago. In Saginaw at WIOG, they kicked off the staff party at 5 pm on Friday. The contesting had the DJ taking the designated caller, and then stepping out of the studio to go to the Promotions office to get the prize. The second they opened the door of the studio you heard loud music, shrieking, yelling…basically a raucous party. Rachel the Promotion Director had had her customary one beer and passed out on the couch, on top of the tickets. So the jock would sneak in, roll her off the tickets and grab them. Rachel would always mumble something like, "Hey. Stop. I'm really drunk. Quit messing with me." And then start snoring again. I typed up a ton of elements for the jocks to talk about when describing the party going on outside their window, in the station lobby. It sounded, well, like the kind of party that listeners expect us to have.
Day-After Gift Exchange Go to Walmart and load up on stuff like the 70's Preservation Society Compilation 8-Track of Disco Hits, a Ronco Bottle and Jar Cutter, etc. On the 26th, take your prizes and the van, go out to a public location and offer to exchange your junky gifts for lousy presents that people got the day before. Listeners can donate a gift to the "pot" and take one out in exchange. The same concept applies to:
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The Great Tie Exchange. One of the stations did this as a "Re-Gifting Weekend”. The jocks hooked up callers who hated their presents and they switched and exchanged them.
Kiss Up For Your Christmas Bonus A lot of stations have used this as a weekend giveaway idea during the holidays. Listeners get 30 seconds to suck up to their boss on the air, and are rewarded with an early Christmas bonus of cash, prizes or a turkey.
Power Presents This is something that Power 96 has done and it was hit. When the station played the "Power Sleigh" SFX, listeners called in to win a Power Present. The designated caller got to come down to the station and pick an envelope off the tree that was in the Power 96 lobby. The tree had hundreds of envelopes on it, containing prizes that ranged from a t-shirt to $500 in jewelry. They then went in the studio, had some egg nog and cookies and opened the envelope on the air.
Beat The Grinch Kind of like Beat The Bomb, but the cash/tickets stop flowing when the Grinch says "I hate Christmas!" They did this in Denver in '17.
Santa's Puking Up The Prizes A couple stations have done this. It appears that Santa got loaded at the North Pole office party and every hour all weekend, he puked up prizes for the listeners. Kind of like Pumpkins Out The Ass, you don't know what you won until it's out and cleaned off.
Wrapping With Wild From Citadel/Knoxville where hourly callers won a stocking filled with wrapping paper, tape, ribbon, tags, batteries and a CD of Wrap music.
Gift Exchange From Wild in Tampa where the weekend after Christmas listeners could trade presents with other callers on the air.
Escort Service Again, surprisingly, from Tampa. Everyone qualified to be taken shopping at a mall in a stretch Hummer with interns dressed as elves to escort them around and buy and carry their presents.
Frosty The Doughman A nice weekend umbrella from Keith Abrams for any contest that awards shopping sprees and spending money.
Wrestling Santa It was a theater-of-the-mind death match on Power 102 in El Paso where listeners wrestled Santa for WWF tickets.
What's In Santa's Sack? The name says it all. In SFO they called this Santa's Unloading His Sack, but the concept's the same. You get whatever is in the bag, every hour all weekend. KPRR had the morning stunt guy "get stuck in a chimney" and he unloaded the stuff that was in the sack that was wedged up there with him.
Naughty Noel Weekend A Wild/Tampa weekend contest that had Sinful Santas (strippers dressed up as elves) out delivering Sexy Stockings which were filled with gifts that required batteries and/or rewinding before returning.
No, Really, You Shouldn't Have! A gift exchange promotion that both Orlando and Sacramento did in 2008. People called in and complained about their crappy presents and traded them with the jocks for whatever prizes were in stock.
Tear Up Santa’s Text A contest from Memphis, where listeners “texted” Santa, and he hit them back, telling them what he was giving them for Christmas, ie: what they’d just won.
Reindeer Races Extreme in Vegas did this theater-of-the-mind contest to award X-Boxes. If the reindeer you picked won, you got the toy.
Reindeer Hunt Jammin’ in Portland hid a plastic lawn deer and whenever they did a Stocking Stuffer on the air, they gave out a clue. The person who retrieved the deer won a Nintendo Gamecube.
Oh Crap!!! It’s Almost Christmas!!! Plays into the whole “it’s the week before Christmas and I haven’t bought a tree or wrapped my presents or made my cookies” vibe. Prizes? Wrapping paper. Stamps for mailing their cards. Christmas cookies and a tree.
The Weekend That Gives You Wood Tree giveaways.
Deck The Walls Wild in Orlando did this four years ago and unloaded tons of gold records and other label stuff that was piling up. Stuff that we take for granted but, for the average listener, would be REALLY cool to have.
7-11 Christmas WIOG in Saginaw did this as a joke aimed at the people who wait until the last possible moment to get gifts and the only thing open are convenience stores. They gave away windshield wiper fluid, pork rinds and car air fresheners.
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