Every Friday afternoon your audience, plowing along on that dismal highway of life, spots an off ramp and for two days take a detour. Their mindset changes. Their pace changes. Their priorities change. And as a radio station, you kind of need to reflect that or appear hopelessly out of touch with the vibe of the audience.
A quick reminder: “Vibe” is the byproduct, the plutonium so-to-speak when you combine Attitude and Emotion. Great radio stations have Vibe.
I’ve always loved weekend contesting and themes because they allow us to divert from whatever we’ve been doing all week and be topical. Great weekends in Radio are all about being topical and addressing what everyone is buzzing about.
One of my favorite clients to work with is 106.1 Kiss-FM in Dallas. They “get” so many things, including weekends themes. They understand that starting at 5 on Friday, Vibe > Prize. You can take pretty much any prize, any download, any ticket, and massage it to fit what the audience is all about.
So when Priscilla reaches out to me on a Wednesday and says “I have Maroon 5 tickets this weekend, what should we do?” the first thing I always ask is: What’s trending with the Kiss listeners right now?
It could be Labor Day. Or back to school. Or oppressive heat. Or a sports scandal. Or a celebrity wedding. Or a Disney star giving millions of men erections that they’ll never ever admit to.
Other good thought starters? Start with the name of the prize. Imagine Dragons tickets morphed into imaging gone by a “power of positive thinking shrink” encouraging the audience to visualize, to imagine their tickets. Realization comes from visualization. Crap like that. And they threw in some Medieval Times tickets so that the winners could see other imaginary dragons.
Of course, a Free Ticket Weekend would have been just as exciting.
So even if you don’t have live talent on the weekend, don’t get caught up in the mindset of “We have to give shit to people for them to like us.” Nope. You just need to have some fun and relevant imaging and sound like the lifestyle of the listeners. THAT is a great weekend.
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