Paige Nienaber’s Midweek Ideas: Know Your Prey

(Author: Paige Nienaber) Fugitive is already working for several of my clients, and one of the keys to success in the hunt is the constant updating of promotions. Most promotions will have one graphic that will last for six weeks and will be indistinguishable from the Massengilla sale promotion at your neighborhood Rite Aid. They are simply This exciting.

One of my favorite stories is about a French-Canadian trapper who comes looking for the elusive Fugitive and uses all his tracking skills to find his prize. Tracking is important to the promotion because to win and recover the loot, you have to follow the clues. “Tracking” is a key element of great contests: forced listening to follow people who guess or give information.

Good examples?

• Ticket Tag. To win, you must know the name of the person who was the last winner, and the next person must know your name, and so on.
• High/Low has been done a million different ways. Mix in Cincinnati did “Cool Beans,” which is a picture of a jar full of coffee beans. Guess the number using previous guesses and a “higher” or “lower” hint from the DJ. NOW in SFO did it for Gaga’s Red Hot candy trip the week before Cinco de Mayo.
• Secret Sound is another very successful tracking promotion. A game for the 96% of people who are not involved in our fun and games. The sound draws them in. I walked into my small town bank and three employees were hunched over phones trying to call Cities 97 while going through a list of previous guesses they had tracked and written down.
• The Match Game is fun because you have a grid visual. You call and pick two panels. The talent tells you what was revealed. Match two and you win. And you have to listen to note that behind panel 36 was a $20 Kohl’s gift card and behind panel 41 was a pair of Swing Out Sister tickets.

Adding “tracking” to a promotion will rarely fail.

Now let’s move on to Dumppage.

Cinema One Scream

Halloweenth haveth arrivedth, at least as far as customer requests go. 104.1 in Hartford has done One Second Cinema. One second of a famous film. Identify it and win. If you have tickets to Halloween attractions, well, you have.

Or you can do it under the name iScream and have it sponsored by some place like DQ.

Halloween Parade

I literally live by a John Mellencamp song every single day. An older guy who is kind of a fixture in the community I live in just celebrated his 90th birthdayt birthday, so the whole city went through the parade to wish him a happy 90th birthdayt.

It was such a success that later that afternoon they decided to do it for all the seniors in town on Halloween. And it was a hit. Over 30 people/families/businesses decorated their vehicles so kids and seniors could stand outside and wave. Because it’s Scandia, the crowds were evenly spread out and not just crammed together at the intersection of four roads. And the seniors loved it. They really can’t wait for the kids to come every year and start decorating.

This can be done as a community event, but it can also be done on a Sunday afternoon by visiting care homes for the elderly.

Visitation

While Family Four Packs are exciting destinations, some of them are geared more towards adults (or at least teens), so buying a group of tickets under that name could work well.

Sell. This.

The Promo folks at Magic in Colorado Springs are already looking at Black Friday and what they can do to attract the masses of campers looking for deals. Coffee deliveries have always been great. Holding seats in line so listeners can enjoy dinner with their families is great. But what do people want? Juice. Power for their devices. Having charging stations would be great.

Sell. This. v2

Flat Stanley is a bit like Flat Fritsch, where Q-102 listeners could take Fritsch off the morning show during their summer vacation and post photos of her adventures around the world.

“Live With” is great. Twenty or thirty crazy, fearless listeners carrying around cardboard cutouts of the morning show for a month to win a prize.

The Thanksgiving version will be called “Eat With.” Download/print a PDF of a morning show host from the site, sit him/her in a chair at a Thanksgiving dinner, post and share with the hopes of winning a fully prepared Thanksgiving meal from a valued customer.

Cucurbitaceae

Halloween photo galleries have started popping up. What if listeners modified their pumpkins to look like celebrities? Wig. Nose. Makeup. Piercing. Post and vote.

Monday with the dog house

Part of being a guy is that we’re naturally stupid and prone to doing stupid things that really annoy the women in our lives.

It could be a sales package with a weekly reward on Monday morning for the guy who screwed up his weekend the most and REALLY needs to get out of trouble with his lady or lady. The station and its valued clients will help with damage control by giving him a dinner for two, maybe a spa package and a night out on the town. Ask me about my first Valentine’s Day as a married guy.

Thanksgiving Foods

First, a reminder, at least for CHR and Rhythm stations: remember to sell out the club night on Wednesday, the 23rdrd. This is a HUGE night for clubbing. Make sure you get there.

Thanksgiving + Food = Many stations had customers asking for holiday specials last week. So…

• Grocery Dash – The Lord God Mother of all promotions involves the listener taking a few seconds to run through the store and grab as much food as they can that they can keep. Then the morning show does the same and passes all of their catch(?) to the food aisle.
• Bowling in Turkey – Many stations have done the same thing, but the most successful and recent is Mix in Cincinnati. They always get the TV and it’s completely sponsored.
• It’s time to binge – Taken by WPGC in DC, where the morning guest documented everything he consumed from 5pm Wednesday until the start of the show Monday. On video. Guess his total calorie intake without going over it to win a Christmas food mess.
• ER, Stat – This requires that you have someone available on Thanksgiving, but no one has ever had some form of T-Day disaster. Prepare meals from the client in advance to get them to the listeners whose holiday depends on you saving as soon as possible.
• Hot/Rooms – Whether you have access to a digital venue or a phone line, most networks have “experts” they love to tout as helpful and resourceful on topics like health and recipes. Have one or two who can help audience members who are trying to differentiate what “two parts vanilla” actually means.
• At work – Who wants to advertise to people who sit and listen to the radio for 9 or 10 hours straight? That’s crazy! The worst Thanksgiving I’ve ever had was when I was in college, my family lived in California, I was the only one left in my dorm at U of M, and I spent the holiday working as a hotel clerk. I treated myself to an Arby’s turkey sandwich that I had bought the day before and saved. Let the customer sponsor a food drive for poor people who have to work.
• High/Low for some Gro Gro – iHeart in Springfield, Mass., was the first to do this. Terry O’Donnell went and filled a shopping cart with random stuff he pulled off the shelves on Sunday, had the load scanned, took a picture of the cart full of stuff, and posted it. The next week, they held a high/low contest to guess the amount to the penny to win a gift card presented as “food for a month,” because gift cards suck.

Paige Nienaber insults/consults with over 100 radio stations at Fun ‘N Games (Marketing & Promotions). Find him on CPR Promotions. Read Paige’s Radio Ink Archives Here.