Creativity used to be a must in the radio business. It didn’t matter which department you worked in. If you worked in programming, your goal was to develop the most unique and interesting content. If you were in sales, you took big, interesting ideas to clients. If you were in promotions, you worked with concert venues, local teams, and maybe record labels to come up with prizes listeners would do anything to win.
Let’s focus on promotions today, because while people still love winning free crap from radio stations, what we give away and how we give it away is less interesting than ever. How many times have you heard the sentence “this is a national contest” run at the end of a promo advertising that listeners can win $1000 on their lunch break? Surely we can do better.
No one will ever bat an eye at big prizes. The cost of living in the United States was already exorbitant long before we started talking incessantly about gas prices and inflation. If you want to kick a listener a hundred bucks just for calling when they hear the phrase that pays, trust me, they won’t care how long it took you to come up with the idea.
I do think it is fair to ask what the long-term payoff is for the station though. Big cash prizes will certainly stick with your listeners, but you can’t give those amounts away with ease.
Next time you need a giveaway you can build a promotion around but don’t have the budget to give away something of monumental value, consider looking inward. This business is so unique and in the eyes of the people that do not work in radio, it is something between a playground and a dream. It costs nothing to give your listeners a little bit of what we do every day. Why not try it?
Creating unique experiences for listeners will create dedicated fans for you. Think about all of the cool promotions you have heard over the years.
It is something Ryan Hurley has done successfully many times before. Whether giving away in-studio experiences or exclusive virtual chats with station talent or other celebrities, the ESPN New York program director knows that those prizes make listeners feel good and create a sense of loyalty in them.
“They walk away feeling like part of the family, feeling like an insider,” he says. “Those intimate connections really help bring people back to the station on a regular basis, creating loyal listeners.”
93.7 The Fan in Pittsburgh is giving the listener that wins the station’s bracket contest the chance to co-host with Poni and Mueller in afternoon drive. SiriusXM gave a fan the chance to call half an inning of MLB’s All-Star Futures Game. When the Covid-19 pandemic canceled plans for the Carolina Hurricanes’ outdoor game, the team’s flagship station, 99.9 The Fan gave two listeners the chance to play their own outdoor game of NHL 94 on the jumbotron at Raleigh’s Carter-Finley Stadium with afternoon hosts Joe Ovies and Joe Giglio.
“There is no question that giving the audience a chance to be up close and personal with a talent is the connective tissue for creating the greatest value of building a fan for life,” 99.9 The Fan program director Sammy Simpson told me. “As the old Chinese proverb says, tell me I forget, show me I may remember, involve me I understand.”
We’re always trying to build meaningful connections with the audience, right? Being able to interact through social media and texts made connections easier than ever to build, but in a certain sense, it also made them a little less meaningful. Our listeners assume we are always available to them now. They are more disappointed when a host doesn’t respond than excited when he or she does.
Meaning comes not from connection, but from experience. Game tickets and t-shirts are nice prizes, but what do they do for the station? Those are benefits that only go one way.
Let listeners compete to be a part of one of your shows, even just for a day, and you are creating memories for them with your branding all over it. Something like that may not guarantee you have created a P1, but it certainly gets you closer than a gift card from Buffalo Wild Wings does.
“Tangible memories and events are tangible to people like money,” Brad Carson, program director of Memphis’s 92.9 ESPN told me. “What do people do when they go meet a star? They take a picture and they post it on social media. They do the same thing with this. I’m not trying to say that we’re rock stars or anything, but we’re part of these people’s lives.”
No matter the business, there is nothing easier to give away inventory. It’s why some stores will only give you store credit when you make a return. No one wants to take money out of the cash register.
Giving away prizes based on experiences at the station costs you nothing. Rarely are there hoops to jump through or elements you are waiting to get in place. On top of that, you can give away the station in a myriad of different ways.
You can give away an hour in-studio with a listener’s favorite host. You can give away an ad campaign to a local business. You can give away the chance to keep stats during a game broadcast.
There are bigger ways to do it too. Look at 95.7 The Game in San Francisco. That station did a search to give a listener his or her own show and discovered Darryl “Guru” Johnson, who years later, is a lynchpin of the lineup. Every station in America is thinking about unique digital content they can offer. Why not do the same sort of search to find a podcast host?
Radio is the entertainment industry in the eyes of our listeners. A foot in the door is more valuable to many of them than a lot of the prizes you have lying around.
It is more valuable to you too. At some point, a thing just becomes something they choose to either get rid of or keep. Your station’s name and how that thing came into the listener’s life fades from memory.
The chance to be hands on with a hosts and brands the listener loves becomes a moment they reflect back on. If you provide a truly memorable experience, it is something that lives with them forever and they go to bat for you whenever they get the chance.
“The fans tune in every day to hear our hosts’ opinions, share their joy and feel their pain,” Danny Zederman, program director of ESPN 1000 in Chicago told me. “There is a connection. Anytime we can bring a fan closer to his/her favorite talent we can create a memory for that fan that will have a lasting effect.”
Being in a studio and being close to the action is our everyday. We can lose sight of the fact that this is a pretty cool world to have a foot in. Start giving listeners a chance to be part of that world and you will be reminded just how cool and valuable it is.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
