Paige Nienaber’s Excellent Adventure
Radio is big on phrases and slogans. “Less Is More” was around for awhile, though one Market Manager referred to it as “Our self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
And there was a four or five year run for “Director of First Impressions”, as in, “V-103, this is Brenda, your Director of First Impressions, how may I help you?”
As cheesy at that sounded, I got it. These people at the front desk ARE our first line of defense and life is too short to have someone call or come in and pick up a prize and then have a crappy customer service experience.
There’s something called The Pass It Along Theory Of Gossip that, and I’m going to screw up the numbers, but if you visit a business and it’s a positive experience, you will share that as anecdotal info with people approximately six times. If you had a bad experience, you will tell over thirty people.
That pretty much tells you all you need to know about meeting listeners: life is too short to piss off even ONE potential audience member because they will remember it and they will remember it forever. A good first impression lasts until you screw it up. A bad first impression is till-death-do-us-part.
And so much of it comes down to the first 8 seconds. It’s everything. Eye contact. Body language. Tone of voice. The whole package.
One of the things that I’ve been doing for three decades in this gig is Street School, or annual training sessions of the interns and summer hires. One of the CBS stations would annually give these seasonal hires a manual to read and then were stunned, gobsmacked, that they would hear that the team seemingly were clueless about attire, protocol and how to represent the brand in public.
“Really? Giving college students more reading material in May wasn’t effective?”
Thus was born Street School; a 90 minute class on the Art of mastering the 8 Second First Impression because you can be assured that if someone meets the Face Of The Station at an event or appearance and the Face smells like White Castle or uses profanity in front of their kid or appears disinterested or is texting, then God will most assuredly get that person and their entire family meters or diaries.
I’ve always applied the lessons of Las Vegas and Disney when training the troops. Disney is built on a Repeat Business model and they achieve that by ensuring as pleasant and error-free an experience as they can. They run their parks like Mussolini ran trains: efficiently. When we launched WiLD in Tampa, the Marketing Director went up the road to Orlando and put himself through Disney U. And he returned with eyes-wide-open about how poorly Radio looks in public. You would never go to the Peter Pan ride and see an empty Big Gulp sitting on the counter or a team member in a dirty shirt.
They also can answer any question that you might have about any aspect of the park.
Vegas conversely has added to that, factoring in body language and the psychology of colors and placement to keep people at a table or a machine longer. Because Minutes = Money.
You would never see a dealer at a playerless table standing there with their arms crossed. They stand there with their arms out, palms extended, as if to say, “C’mon over Slick. I mean you no harm. I have ONLY your best intentions in mind. Wanna free watered down cocktail?”
One of the constants that you’ll see with successful stations, is that they always have outstanding customer service.
And so it came to be in 2001 that I became a dad.
And so it came to be in 2003 that we repeated that.
And as happens with kids, they grew up and left for college. It would have been easier if I hated them but sadly they’re kinda cool. And when the youngest headed off to join her big sister in college this past August, it hit me. Hard.
Empty Nesting SUCKS.
One of my friends from school had a suggestion, “You work at home. You’re your own boss. You set your own hours. Why not get out of the house and pick up some PT hours.” Huh. My biz travel is ¼ of what if was pre-COVID. This made sense. I really needed to be around people.
I have a job. In fact, I have the greatest job in the world but if I didn’t get out of the house for 15-20 hours a week, it was likely that I’d be one of those CNN stories where my neighbors express surprise…but maybe not too much. “He was a quiet man. He’d often dress up as a clown for children’s parties….”
Using indeed.com I started looking at places around my little corner of semi-rural Minnesota. My 8th grade Shop Class grades immediately eliminated most of the job openings, and some people should NOT be involved in food prep….and then….an opening leapt off the screen at me. A nearby gambling establishment was hiring for Guest Relations. The job description included “Greeting guests, answering their questions, running contests and setting up events.”
That sounds familiar. In fact when they asked in the interview if I had any experience in Guest Relations, I answered, honestly, “Well, I wrote a book about it.” (“The Street Hackers Guide To The Universe”, available at cpr-promotions.com and wherever adult content for discerning men can be found).
Thus, I stepped onto the other side of the looking glass, I crossed the velvet rope, and got to see how other industries manage first impressions.
Casinos have always been a natural media partner for Radio and I’ve seen a few people in our industry who segged into the gambling field. We do concerts. They do concerts. We have promotions and contesting. They have promotions and contesting. We have listeners. They have customers. There are a LOT of parallels.
And so my adventure began.
In Radio we MAY, if they’re lucky, have a meeting with the Promo hires. One of the iHeart clusters at Street School had the Market Manager introduce himself and explain the formats and audiences for each of the stations. I thought that was marginally brilliant.
The casino’s version was four hours of paid orientation. It was more of a “filling out forms” and learning about benefits session. We also got our manuals, which were very similar to some that I see in Radio, though a little more tech heavy since Guest Relations has a lot of digital requirements and they run on five different programs. Players Cards on one. Comp redemption on another. Coupon generation on another, etc et al.
The manual was created by the front counter person with the longest tenure and she’s mastered trouble shooting every possible scenario that we could be presented with. It was invaluable and the first place I would look when getting confronted with “Poker is comping a guy with handicapped parking”. If it wasn’t in the manual, it was key work searchable. It reminded me of the thick binder that they have in a cockpit. The green cross-flow light has switched to green? First, pray like you’ve never prayed before, and then pull the binder and work the solution.
Mix in Houston and Beasley in Tampa have pretty outstanding manuals and the casino’s version touched on a lot of the same body language and hygiene and “smile!” aspects. But it also hit hard on punctuality. Huh…no…that’s never been a problem in Radio.
And it covered attitude:
- Remember that attitude is infectious. If your attitude appears or feels sour, it will spread to guests, coworkers and managers.
- Check your personal issues at the door. Work is not the time or place to air grievances to coworkers of guests.
- Treat all customers like they are important. It doesn’t matter if they are first timers or regulars. Actively listen to them, and answer their questions and concerns to the best of your abilities.
- Do not allow someone else’s negativity to upset you or cause you to be negative. Whether it’s a guest or a peer.
- Remember that NO ONE is perfect and everyone is allowed to to make mistakes. Including guests and yourself.
That last part really hit home. Forty years in Radio Promotions and I had been engrained to believe that making a mistake is a career ending event. Bill Tanner put it best: “Make better mistakes tomorrow.”
But I definitely carried that apprehension in and guess what? I locked the GR desk out of the system until IT could remotely open it, I boofed a till count on my first night and made a duplicate players card which sounds stupid, but it’s kind of a deal. And I was basically told, “Hey, look who turned out to be human.”
That helped.
One of my favorite most ass-kicking Promotion Director walked away from Radio in the mid-00’s because the Market Manager had a ZERO ERROR policy. It’s going to happen. You’re going to leave the station on time, factoring in traffic…and get stuck behind a funeral. Which happened to her. She got to a remote six minutes late. And there was a memo in her file on Monday morning. I think she suggested, “Just hire a cyborg” in her parting email.
What are some other parallels between customer service and one-on-one Marketing in Radio and the casino industries?
Placement
A lot of times where we set up at fairs, fests and concerts is determined by a promoter. Then it just behooves you to be creative and maximize whatever you get stuck with. At a Bruno Mars concert Power 96.1 in Atlanta got creative, and away from their canopy they were able to set up a speaker array that “painted the plaza” with music as 16,000 people filed slowly into the show….and pinged two meters.
Boom goes the dynamite.
Guest Relations here is based at the front door and at the point where the two areas that form the V merge. We’re the first people you see when you arrive and the last to see you and wish you a great day as you leave.
It’s the same concept as concerts: as a station, you want to be the people who greet everyone as they arrive, and you want that moment to be BEFORE they reach Radio Row. Maybe across the street or in the parking ramps. And you want to be the last impression which is why, at Rihanna in Ottawa, we put the team and the vehicles at the on-ramp to the freeway thanking everyone for “coming to our show!” as they headed home
Food
Radio learned in about 1933 that free pizza would motivate people to come to our crappy remotes.
Obviously casinos are competitive in terms of their fare and they market their specialities. But food as a freebie? Yup. And you literally need to be from Minnesota (or select parts of western Wisconsin) to “get” this, but my employer offered free smoked trout in email offers to upper tier guests.
Yes. Smoked trout and literally half my questions the last week of December were from frozen and frazzled people who came in with their coupon to get their ziplock baggie of fish.
Every audience has buttons. The Marketing Dept here clearly knows them and trout is one.
Contests & Promotions
Obviously we do contesting geared at the 4% of people who play contests and the P1’s. I personally like methodologies that suck in the 96%, like Secret Sound, Fugitive, Beat The Bomb to name a few.
The Gaming industry has P1’s and those are the Whales, the frequent guests, the upper tier gamblers. They are courted and rewarded. And they know their points and tier and there is a certain expectation of status. The more they spend, the more comps they earn and the more entries into any of the cash or prize drawings that they get.
The closest that Radio has come in real time tracking is Hubbard’s streaming awards. It’s moderately brilliant and has taken 2005-era VIP Clubs to the next level.
Radio seems to have desensitized people to “win $1000”. It just doesn’t mean anything. If it did then more than 4% of people would play our contests. “Boring methodologies” play a big part of that too.
Some of the stations have discovered that “gadgets” move the needle, like 94/9’s vaunted iPad series in San Diego.
My night gig has their cash incentives but will also do big boy toys and other physical prizes that can be put on display and ogled at. If you can activate some ogling, you’re going to win.
Putting The Right People In The Right Positions
I had literally the worst assistant in Radio when I worked at Wild in San Francisco. She was ornery and prone to yelling at people when they came to pick up prizes. I’ve seen that over the years where we will put the wrong people out to greet our listeners. People whose strengths aren’t happiness and joy and empathy.
Maybe they’d be great as a Sales asst or doing social media. But dealing with the dregs of society at a four day music festival is just going to end poorly.
Conversely iHeart in Wichita had a street teamer named Sunny who was unbelievable. She was like a contact high of happiness.
Know what your team’s strengths are and put them where they fit best.
It would be an understatement to say that in a casino, you might find people who are not having the best day. I think it was maybe my 9th night working the desk when I found myself being verbally abused and told that I was “not the brightest person” that our valued guest had ever met. That’s probably true but the tone…that’s what got me. I smiled, said nothing and handed him his comps. Mentally? I was keying the FUCK out of his pickup truck.
This joint’s version of Sunny is Hanna and she is the personification of ebullient, effusive cheer, which is perfect for her job as a server.
Not everyone is suited to deal with the public, so consider that when mixing and matching where to put someone.
Freebies
In Radio we have stickers and shirts and keychains.
When we launched Wired in Philly, Monica, the Promotions Coordinator for a metric ton of pens and handed them out to servers at bar and restaurants, who then stuck them in people’s faces when they signed their bills.
Promotions is the Art of getting your logo in front of people, over and over and over for a low cost. The pens worked.
By far the most popular freebie at the casino? Free pens. People love them and they will actually use them, over and over. That’s a sign of good swag.
Speaking Of Swag
In the 1980’s stations in the Twin Cities discovered that they could make their 3rd Q budget by selling swag at the Minnesota State Fair. The styles and designs have evolved but they still move the merch.
The Beasley stations have refined and streamlined that and have great, active, online sales.
My little PT gig also sells wearables and again, appears to be tapped into the specific audience that they draw. Hats are big and there are 10 designs including a ski cap, shirts do all right, but they have rotated through NICE hockey jerseys for $100 and sweats for $45 and people buy them up.
Promotions as applied to Radio, gaming or anything else requires that you know the audience and what they would actually pay money for. Beefy tee “fun run shirts” (thank you to Jay Kruz for that) aren’t going to move the needle in 2023.
“So, When Is The Next Taylor Swift Contest Going To Start?”
Earlier I’d referenced Street School and how we train the team to be educated about the brand because there are going to be ten questions a day that they’ll be asked and if they don’t know the answer, they’re going to look like a fool.
The promo team should listen to the station, visit the site and follow the posts on social media.
At the casino they have idiot-proofed it and the first thing you are instructed to do when you plop down in the seat is to read the emails. They cover changes in codes, updates on inventory, supplies, swag, contests…basically everything. And there is also a one sheet with the updated hotel rates and occupancy, tourneys, free offers to the tiers and current promotions and drawings. It’s simple and brilliant and can answer 90% of the questions I get on the phone or in person.
To paraphrase the business model, the goal is to get people in, get them seated and keep them in their seats, so any time we can shave off that process by quickly and accurately answering their questions and pointing them in the right direction, it’s a win.
Employee Spirit
Being a representative of a radio station at events and in the community has often been referred to as the Bataan Death March: it’s long, arduous, dusty and filled with many pleasant, happy people who just brighten our lives.
As a Promotion Director, I always saw myself as Spanky from the “Our Gang” series. Spanky was the person who initiated stuff. Who could read the room and know when it was time to put on a show in the barn. For me that included occasional outings to go bowling or laser tag or to a ball game or to a pool hall or just snow tubing.
Kris Cegla, when she was at KDWB in the Twin Cities, would do something after the 4th of July. It was the point in the Summer where the kids would begin to show some fatigue. She did a couple of soirees to the Apple River to go tubing…until there was a little too much drunken nudity. Then they went to a theme park. Whoops.
The Spanky at my night job has brought that same spirit to her gig. It’s not just Secret Santa’s and random team bonding and time killing games (one that I ripped off from KS95), but this can be a little cliquey, The dealers are to this biz as morning talent are to radio. Guest relations is our own little club and the people in charge have let us know through their actions that we are NOT unappreciated. Which is nice. I learned from a guy named Dan Seeman that going out and hanging banners with the team goes a long way.
And thus is my adventure, such as it is. And it is fun and it’s been really a trip to see how another, similar, business handles in person marketing. And I’ve learned that fake ID’s have progressed light years beyond the cheap little laminated piece of crap that I had when I was 16.
And remember…always stand on 17.
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