TORONTO — Create experiences for your listeners that matter. Get people talking about what you’re doing to be top of mind with your audience. Use the power of the team around you when coming up with new and innovative strategies for your station. That was some of the advice offered by three of Canadian radio’s top idea people who spoke at the Radio Interactive Summit, held last week in Toronto as part of Canadian Music Week.
The “30 in 45: The Broadcasting ‘Idea Machine’” session promised to deliver 30 great ideas in 45 minutes and Karen Steele, program director for 99.9 Virgin Radio in Toronto and 105.3 Virgin Radio in Kitchener, said one recent successful promo for Virgin’s Toronto station featured a different spin on the “Pay Your Bills” contest. Rejigged as “Destroy Your Debt”, the contest asked listeners to text their stories about how they had come to be in debt.
“The stories were fantastic,” Steele said. “It was a contest that turned into great content for the radio station, where listeners were engaged and telling their stories. Then we realized the stories kept getting crazier because they knew that’s what was going to get the win and get on air.” Virgin complemented the contest with a digital campaign that included a spoof video featuring the station’s afternoon drive guy, “who is game for anything, which I love,” Steele said. As of a week ago, the video had 800,000 views, she said.
“People were just mocking us. It was merciless, and I loved it because they were talking about it,” Steele said. “It helped with the fun brand that is Virgin Radio.”
Brad Gibb is the program director for three Corus Entertainment radio stations in London, Ont. — FM96, 103.1 Fresh Radio and Country 104 and every March for the last four years, the three stations have featured March Madness contests that coincide with U.S. college basketball’s annual tournament. Using a similar format, each radio station’s contest begins as a tournament of 64, with each round eliminating one of the contenders in each matchup.
“It [the contest] is branded for the radio station. It could be the greatest beards in country music on Country 104, or it could be the greatest candy on Fresh Radio. On FM96 this time around we decided to do the small town tournament of 64,” he said.
Each day the FM96 morning show hosts highlighted two small towns in and around London, Ont., by Googling the town names to see what came up in search results, Gibb said. “The guys would come on the air and they would do, just like a basketball game, a quick analysis of what St. Marys would look like up against Lucan.”
Gibb said the contest turned into a huge promotion for FM96 because of the pride people had in their small towns. In fact, the station’s contest page was the third biggest webpage in terms of hits across all of Corus Radio through the month of March. “It really was an interactive win. It got people talking,” he added. “It’s one of those contests that we really had zero budget for. It was just a goofy idea and it turned into one of the best things we’ve done this year.”
Tammy Cole also works for Corus Entertainment, as program director for two Corus radio stations in Toronto — Q107 and The Edge 102.1 — and two in Winnipeg — Peggy@99.1 and Power 97. When regular promotions and contests, such as money giveaways, become a little bit stale over time, she said one good way to innovate is to use the station’s text line to engage with listeners. It can also help to determine the interest level of listeners in the contests, Cole said.
“Is this really a play-along, entertaining contest that people really love even though they’re not going to win the money?” Cole asked. “In Winnipeg, we started having people give advice for the contestant on the text line. The bounce back for the text would be, ‘Hey, thanks for playing along. Where do you live in the city?’ And they would text you back.”
In addition to helping to engage with listeners, texting would provide a little bit of market research about where listeners were located, Cole explained. “Who’s listening? Where are they working? Which part of the city are they from? It actually helps you with your marketing campaigns, too. Which pockets of the city do we need to hit? Just look for ways to innovate what you already do really well.”
Steele added that texting is the easiest and best way to have listeners enter contests. “It’s just: text it, forget it, tune in,” she said.
To give his morning hosts and drive team some perspective on radio listeners’ experience during their morning commute, once or twice a year Gibb will take his morning radio crew off the air and drive them around the city in his car. “If you think about how your personalities go about their day, if you’re on a morning show, you have no idea what the world is like outside the studio between 5:30 and 9:30 every single day,” he said. “The whole idea for that is, one, I can give them a real sense of what it’s like to deal with traffic in London at 7:30 in the morning.”
Gibb pointed out that everything in London is only 15 or 20 minutes away, so the morning drive isn’t a lot of time for the radio station hosts to connect with their listeners.
“To take them off the air for the day, I find it very beneficial.” – Brad Gibb, Corus Radio
“The other part of that is you end up listening to the other shows that are going on. You get kind of a real-time monitor as to this is what Virgin is doing in the morning,” he said. “This is what’s happening while you guys are doing this, this is going on in the world as well. To take them off the air for the day, I find it very beneficial.”
Cole said she has found it helpful, when coming up with a new contest idea, to get members of the sales team to rehearse the contest as a way to gauge whether or not they’ll be able to sell sponsors on the idea. “While we always want to make sure the sales-programming relationship is a cohesive yet codependent one, sometimes you’ll have these great ideas and you’ll pitch them to the sales team and you’ll get that look back, ‘Yeah, sorry, we don’t get it.’ And so it remains unsold,” she said.
Not every radio contest or promotion is a winner, however, and the three radio program directors shared some of their contest horror stories.
When she worked previously at rock station 97.7 HTZ-FM in St. Catharines, Ont., Steele was one of two organizers of a contest to give away a pair of tickets to a concert featuring Pearl Jam and Nirvana in Seattle, during the height of grunge music. The contest was held in a bar and involved a Mr. Turtle kiddie pool filled with jam, with 10 contestants searching for a single pearl dropped into the jam. When nobody had found the pearl after five minutes, a second pearl was put into the jam-filled pool. As a result, two contestants ended up finding pearls at the same time and were jointly awarded the pair of tickets.
“We were in a bad situation where we had two winners and we only had one pair of tickets. I think we were broadcasting live. It was awful,” Steele said.
Gibb spoke about a recent contest mishap involving a monster truck event organizer, with competing couples digging in dirt to win an engagement ring. “This is maybe a lesson in really knowing exactly what’s happening in your promotion. We had a third-party company that does monster trucks in arenas…we were just basically promoting the contest because they took care of everything on their end,” he explained.
The problem was the dirt the couples were digging through to find the engagement ring was the same dirt used over and over for the monster truck shows so it was peppered with sharp objects such as glass. “So these couples go down, they start digging in the dirt, somebody wins and two weeks later we get a call and we get served with papers, because this woman has just torn her hand up with this contest that we were attached with,” Gibb said. “You really got to know everything that’s going on.”
Cole said when she worked previously at a radio station in Edmonton, her morning show had a good sense of humour and came up with a “Toss Your Boss” promotion.
“We held a contest where you could nominate your bad boss and toss them out of a plane. And it would be tandem, so you’d have a parachute. What we didn’t anticipate was that two of three employees would get fired after the bosses were tossed. Nobody died, nobody got hurt. But yeah, we had to rethink that a little bit.”
