We can overthink prizing and get caught up such exciting and needle-freezing contests as The $1000 Free Money Text. People love movies. They’re the Entertainment Universal so these will always great prizes. What can you do to make your screenings or ticket giveaways, if not special, at least better than the other stations in town?
Do you want to win, or do you want to follow the rules? I think you can do both, but sometimes you have to make a tough decision and beg for forgiveness. I got called on the carpet to explain why I had changed a weekend contest early on a Friday evening. I explained that it was simple: the competition was beating us, and did we want to follow the rules or did we want to win.
Street Teamers are far more likely to be approached and asked a question about the programming or promotions of a radio station than anyone else on the staff. So it kind of behooves them to have the answers. Being an effective representative of the radio station is a lot more than wearing a clean T-shirt and having above-average hygiene. It’s about having knowledge of the brand and being able to share it with the listeners and listeners-to-be.
Using rudimentary math, it would figure that if we can get more than 4% of people to play our contests and maybe even get that number up to, say, 8%, then we’ll be doing pretty well.
There’s a reason we can’t get that number over 4% and that’s because most of the contests that we clutter the airways with are really just wallpaper. I would categorize most group contests that way. They’re just….there. They’re not compelling, they don’t play to anybody other than the 4% of people we have hyper focused on and they rarely accentuate or build your stationality.
Think beyond the tiny number of people with their landlines and broaden your horizons; try to suck in the whole audience to stop and become engaged. If it doesn’t double your audience, it’s still not going to drag the numbers down like a wallpaper contest can.
There’s no doubt that there’s a generation of Radio People who the significance of the first decade of MTV, would be totally lost on them. MTV was basically Radio. But with a visual. The programming was based on Radio. The people who created it and 4 of the five first VJ’s were all from Radio. Bob Pittman and the rest took great, classic radio promotional concepts that we will still do, and add a visual to them. The methodology was usually the same: send in a post card. And that’s fine. Great prizes are usually bigger than the way we award them.
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