We’re pretty passive when it comes to going after numbers. We try to play the best music, we try to entice some people to join in with contesting and marketing and we spam them on social media.
With diaries and the ability to manipulate entries through top of mind and loyalty, a standard battle plan was to go out and fish for diaries in some of the far flung corners of the market that might get ignored by the other boats. They’re out there, waiting to be romanced, courted, and reeled in.
I’ve seen this work over and over. A station will go out and do van runs and morning show broadcasts and have presence at community events in outlying areas…and in the next monthly, zing, they got a diary or two.
This, by the way, still is viable for PPM. You have all of these people who are out there in surveyed areas but are ignored by Radio because, well, they’re in the sticks.
So, would you fish in a lake with 1.1 million fish and that’s jammed with other fishermen, or would you hit a lake with 38,000 fish. That’s the analogy of Hennepin County and Isanti County in the Twin Cities metro. The prized fish, the ones with the meters, are maybe going to be a little easier to land on a less crowded and over-fished lake.
Okay. Enough with the fishing metaphors. I apologize. It’s May. In Minnesota.
I was having a discussion yesterday with a PPM OM and he was talking about ways to ping some meters in public places. He referred to a local event that draws 100,000 and that has long long lines requiring people to stand outside the gates for ten to 15 minutes to get in. “100,000 people? There HAS to be a meter or two in the bunch”.
And he would be kerrect. So he’s going to have speakers set up and blasting the station at the crowds. “If I can get five minutes of a quarter hour, shit, I’ll take it.”
As would most people.
You are heading into a period packed with large crowds crammed into small areas. So do what 102 Jamz in Orlando did pre-PPM; offer to have the jocks make crowd announcements at a large 4th of July festival…and use the station as the soundtrack for all the festivities leading up to the fireworks that night.
Ditto with shopping malls during the holidays. I would always go out before Thanksgiving with swag and go store to store to store, bribing them to turn us on and leave us on throughout the holiday shopping season. We would go back and do spot checks. If they had us on, they got rewarded.
So, even if they don’t choose to listen to you when they’re in control of their radios, we can still occasionally mug their meter.
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