I find myself again referring to a station that went from First to Worst. It was such a crashing failure that people literally would have had to sit down and say “Okay, let’s fuck this up.” It would be like driving McDonalds out of the burger industry: it would take effort.
The one constant over the years was “amazing promotions”. They always had something happening. “Something” could be a contest. It would be an event. It could be a stunt. It could be something stupid that the morning show was doing. It could be a reaction to an event or occurrence in the market place. But there was always something that the DJ’s could talk about.
As a Promotion Director, I was undoubtedly guilty of going to the extreme. It was a barrage of promotions. That’s never good and I knew that I’d done it again when someone from the air staff would come to me looking confused.
Whoops.
So, one of the Alpha stations sent me their calendar for the next three months and it was perfect. One thing ends, and the next thing begins. Over and over and over and over. No down time. Like dominoes. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
To be on the receiving end of something like that is punishing because you’re fighting for attention. Fighting to get noticed and you can’t because something is always happening on the other station.
You’ll see stations that just get into that zone. It’s not a constant, it’s hard to maintain and keep up, but wow…when it’s happening, it’s Art.
98PXY in Rochester found themselves in the Zone a few years back. A Super Bowl thing that went RIGHT into a Valentines thing on Monday morning and that ended and they went into a Mardi Gras marathon RV trip which ended and the next day went into a concert trip, into St. Patricks Day, into a contest…boom boom boom boom. One after another.
The audience has the attention span of a Golden Retriever. Think “Las Vegas”. How do they keep some poor guy on a Rascal, sucking oxygen through tubes, sitting at the I Dream Of Jeanie penny slot for 6 hours. With constant, albeit tiny, payoffs that hint at something bigger. If he rolled away, he’s SURE that he’d miss it.
“But we don’t have a contest”. Cool. Generally contests suck. Then create something. Just grab onto a premise and build something stupid out of it. Like Rob & Joss at Froggy in Santa Rosa. They did a thing with him getting waxed for Tax Day. They’d come out of a thing on Monday morning, he got waxed on Tuesday and on Wednesday they started a morning show feature and went from that into teasing Earth Day. Boom boom boom boom.
We have all been fans of a TV show and been loyal to it for years and then, just one Tuesday night you thought “I can survive if I don’ t catch it tonight.” That’s when TV shows have turned the corner. The Bad Corner.
So get a calendar, write in what you know you have coming up and start filling in the blanks. Like a row of dominoes.
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