CPR Promotional Check-Up

Car Testimonials

Tommy Kramer had a great line about jock testimonials that start with stuff like "My friends at Nienaber Toyota asked me to..." Paraphrased, he said the audience is savvy (not "smart") enough to call BS on any DJ hanging out with advertisers socially.

The best testimonial car bit of 2009 was from Hot in Houston where they gave five women each a car to blog about for the summer. Actual human beings writing about how their car was helping them with work, parenting...living.

A cool car is a vanity purchase. So two testimonial concepts would be:

1. Do a version of asseenatwalmart but with people checking out your ride. Park it in front of a club and snap photos of people pausing to ogle it. Staged? Absolutely. People are autotists. This plays to that. You WANT a car that people will stop and look at and be envious of.
2. Cool cars change the driver. Ask me sometime to tell you about my wife and her little red Eclipse. The idea would be that the blog testimonial would be done by the jock's alter ego. The person they become when they're in the car. The car becomes Superman's phone booth. Get in and suddenly become the person you always wanted to be.

An At-Work Breast Cancer Promotion

No less than three stations are broaching the Bras Across frontier for '10. It's entirely possible to over think this. You collect bras. You loop them. You stretch them. You get press. You do a fundraiser party to celebrate.

One of the stations has a client that wants to do lots and lots of free mammograms. What no station has ever done is The Big Squeeze. The office/workplace with the highest percentage of employees coming in to (client) to get screened in the month of October, wins a movie screening and lunch for the entire place. Not based on numbers but percentage of the female workforce.

Ho? No.

Sadly, the people I thought/hoped were visionaries at Leighton Broadcasting turned out to be spineless lackies who buckled under community pressure and just two days after launching, 94.7 Santa-FM is no longer.

Sigh.

On Tuesday the street blitz of Santas continued. But also imaging began to pop up with a directive to listen for an early Christmas present at 9:47 Wednesday morning, followed by one of an array of "listeners" stating something like "Wow!! This is exactly what I wanted!"

More clubs that night.

And the next morning Jarrod Thomas returned to the airwaves with a retraction of his previous announcement that after the biggest music research study in US Radio history (1.8 million surveys, 400 focus groups, hundreds of thousands of phone interviews) he had taken a fresh and sober look at the numbers. Yes, JT acknowledged that he and the staff were drunk when poring through the research. "There was alcohol. LOTS and LOTS of alcohol". Plus they were looking at the numbers upside down. The formatic hole? A hip CHR. He begged forgiveness, promised that he would never EVER again do music research ("it's really confusing and I was never good at math to begin with") and Z-94.7 debuted.

On streetcorners around town, the Santa's tore off their suits and were dancing and waving new signs at cars. This was also the first day of classes at UND and the station was on-site marketing to 5000 18-22 year-olds as they arrive. More clubs Wednesday night. And Menage A Gaga debuted with tickets to see LG next Tuesday in Minny.

Big? Well....you really couldn't go anywhere in town without hearing people talking about it. And I guess that's cool. Ashley Toops, the Promotion Director went to pick up Chinese food during a break and two couples in their 50's were sitting in a booth engaged in "spirited banter" for fifteen minutes about whether the Christmas music was real or a stunt.

I had breakfast at the hotel and signed the bill "Santa Claus" (they had me registered under that). In about a minute I had four employees at my table asking questions about the stunt and saying that it was on the radio back in the kitchen.

And one of the young women said, unprompted, "In October they should switch to Halloween music!"

THAT...is a homerun.