Radio Lives
In 1951, radio promotions pioneer Todd Storz caused legendary traffic jams in Omaha, Neb., when his local station KOWH gave clues to listeners where they might find free cash. The next year, Storz ordered a deejay to just climb a tree and start throwing cash at passers-by.
Creative stunts and contests endure more than five decades later, as stations and their advertisers take advantage of technological advancements like cell phone text messaging.
Broadcasters need all the help they can get. Ratings are slipping, and satellite upstarts Sirius and XM continue to pick up millions of subscribers willing to pay $10 a month.
The Internet has enabled radio to transform itself from a strictly audio medium to one with visual immediacy as well.
Promotions have become increasingly important to the radio business in the past decade as a primary strategy for building a sense of community and combating audience erosion, notes Jim Kerr, veteran DJ of New York classic rock station Q104.3.
Virtually every radio station now encourages the audience to register online for “preferred listener status.” This, in turn, helps solidify the bond between the listener and the station, as well as partnering marketers.
“Promotions are the way to connect directly with listeners, rather than just connecting through the medium,” says Kerr. “It’s taking that extra step — the part of this business that gives us the most personal contact with listeners. We spend a lot of time by ourselves in a little studio speaking into a piece of metal.”
Nationally, terrestrial radio lost listeners for the third straight year in 2006. According to Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s annual communications industry report, the total number of people listening in the average quarter hour decreased 2.5% to 26.6 million. That included a 0.4% slip in automobile listeners, to 9.2 million per quarter-hour, and a 0.9% dip among in-house listeners, to 7.1 million.
“In any market, when you’re battling to take the lead in a format, it’s important you have leadership in promotional spend,” says Dr. Leo Kivijarv, vice president of research for PQ Media, which collaborates with Veronis Suhler on the communications report. “Listeners will be less likely to switch channels in between the music.”
Even though the funds spent on promotions represent a small share of revenue, it continues to be a significant revenue generator as they’re bundled with larger spot buys, according to Dr. Kivijarv. Barter arrangements have largely given way to straight monetary deals for promotional time.
Total spending on radio — broadcast, satellite and digital advertising and content — hit $21.77 billion in 2006 for a 3.7% growth rate, according to the Veronis Suhler Stevenson. Terrestrial radio revenues were flat for the year at $20.14 billion, while satellite radio revenues grew by 95%, to $1.47 billion. Digital content and ad spending was at $154 million, a 75.4% annual increase.
Veronis Suhler anticipates a continuation of the talent migration from terrestrial radio that began dramatically with shock jock Howard Stern, who is now on satellite radio exclusively. And with all the other entertainment competition fighting for consumers’ leisure time (e.g., iPods), radio listener share is likely to continue to erode.
“The immediacy that radio has is really suited to promotions and being able to respond in real time,” says Weezie Kramer, regional vice president of Entercom Communications, the nation’s fourth largest radio broadcaster. “We always had the telephone [to interact with listeners]. But you don’t have to be the tenth caller anymore.”
A station’s Web site enables not only on-demand live and archival programming without a radio receiver, but also immediate listener entry into contests — expanding the range of the traditional on-air pitch.
New York’s Q104.3 has 70,000 listeners signed up to receive its weekly e-mail “blasts” that give them an advanced heads-up on upcoming promotions and station events.
Its “workforce” promotion enables registered listeners to win $104 when their names are announced during four regularly scheduled contest times daily. The current contest is for the title of honorary music director, with listeners submitting playlists to register. The daily winners are entered for the ultimate prize of $104,000.
A trio of Entercom rock stations in Sacramento are conducting a cross-promotional campaign, offering listeners the ability to customize and download ringtones with a tool called Tonemaker DJ. The ringtones include a theme from local car dealer Maita Scion, which has been sending a Scion branded with the Tonemaker DJ logo to Sacramento night clubs.
“There are unlimited possibilities of what you can do with your Web sites,” says Mark Kopelman, senior vice president of the Western region for Clear Channel Radio Houston. “A lot of stations are now able to take their best or high-profile talent and time-shift it to online.”
Those audio streams spawn fresh revenue streams for stations that can sell online ads around the repurposed on-air content. “It’s a whole new revenue stream,” Kopelman notes.
Non-spot revenue growth is borne out by the latest Radio Advertising Bureau figures. Nationally, that category totaled $409 million in the second quarter of 2007, a 16% increase over the same period last year. And the $711 million recorded in non-spot revenue for the first half of 2007 represents a 12% rise over the first half of 2006, according to RAB.
Other mainstay revenue categories, including local and national revenue, were flat or slightly lower over the same periods.
But it’s not just the signals’ cyberspace re-transmission that’s having a transcendent effect on radio, Kopelman says. It’s the ability to promote offers via e-mail, enable requests from Web sites via cell phone, and then send the listener a text message alert about precisely when the tune will play.
While the tenth-caller routine is still in the playbook, as are concert ticket giveaways, the preferred option play is to push the listener online.
“When it comes to radio promotions, it’s not about producing a radio spot in a cluster and getting it buried. It’s about engaging the station and reaching beyond,” says Mike Valentino, CEO of TMPG, a radio promotions specialty agency. “You can’t do radio promotions without an online component.”
TMPG’s campaign to promote tween pop sensations Ally and AJ cobbled on-air appearances with online blogs, ticket giveaways and a “flyaway” to a concert appearance.
For a campaign promoting Dish satellite TV, TMPG arranged for DJs to have Dish hook-ups so they could talk about the viewing experience first-hand on-air. An online component offered video downloads and featured a member of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” comedy team dishing on cable TV — and never directly mentioning Dish TV.
“Everybody’s looking for that touchpoint,” says Valentino. “Everything’s going online. It’s free-form syndication.”
That may be true, but, meanwhile, there is a continuing battle to fend off the federal government’s attempts to dramatically increase the royalties that streaming Webcasters must pay, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Usually promotions are devised at the local level. But in September, the mammoth station group Clear Channel ran a campaign to plug NBC’s new “Chuck” sitcom, with actors from the series staging hour-long “takeovers” at its stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia to plug the show.
“Radio is something where you have to flood the airwaves with one thing so people know about it,” says Marcos Montes, promotions director at Sacramento hip hop/R&B station KSFM. “If we’re giving away cash or an iPhone, we make sure we’re talking about it all the time.”
These days, stations typically draw audiences in various dayparts by specifying exactly when listeners need to tune in.
“We want to tell them, come back at this specific time,” says Darren Pfeffer, director of marketing at New York’s top-rated Z100 and Power 105.1. “It’s all about setting appointments [with listeners] and getting them to come back to the stations.”
Several times daily, Z100 issues calls to members of its registered listener base to call in to have their bills paid (up to $1,000), with winners entered for a grand prize drawing to win a Nissan Altima Hybrid from a local New Jersey dealership, Ramsey Auto. “We’re always looking for ways to incorporate advertisers into our promotions,” says Pfeffer.
In a promotion with Silverjet, the new low-fare international airline, Q104 in August gave away a trip to London with VIP tickets to see the concluding concert of the Rolling Stones’ recent Bigger Bang Tour.
Earlier this year, Z100 told its listeners that morning DJ Elvis Duran needed to expand his audience. The station then held a contest to design a billboard. The winner was reproduced in two midtown Manhattan billboards proclaiming Duran the Wizard of Zoo (as in “morning zoo”) with the rest of his team attired in various Wizard of Oz guises.
Station marketing mavens emphasize the need to create promotional contests that offer listeners more than tickets to an event. Z100 recently ran a contest to send 20 listeners who sent pictures to its Web site to an Ashley Tisdale fashion show. “It’s all about giving 20 lucky listeners an experience, not just sending them to an event,” says Pfeffer. “It’s great to have that user-generated content, whether it’s video or audio.”
Q104’s Jim Kerr recalls a “Text Dirty To Me” contest the station ran for tickets to a Poison concert (playing off the group’s “Talk Dirty To Me” hit). Q104 fielded 6,000 text messages in 15 minutes from fans of the heavy metal band — and was able to let them know immediately if they were winners.
The risqué edge in many radio promotions is typified by Q104’s current Hottest Mom contest, offering a $5,000 prize in a competition that utilizes the Web’s visual virtue.
That’s tame stuff compared to the lunatic fringe of promotional radio that lives in the shadow of Howard Stern. That fringe is personified by DJs Opie & Anthony, who air their stunts on New York City’s K-Rock and XM satellite radio.
For the film, “Hot Rod, ” Opie & Anthony ran the “Hottest Rod” contest, which required contestants to lather liniment on their genitals in an endurance competition. “When people are praising you for a truly disgusting moment, then you know you did well,” says Steve Carlesi, Opie & Anthony producer.
Going to conceptual extremes is still common practice as stations are intent to break through the clutter with guerrilla tactics. When Grand Central Marketing ran a promotion for Svedka Vodka, it invented the Svedka sisters, two Swedish blonds who showed up unannounced at radio stations to offer massages to the DJs. “We skipped the promotions department and went straight to the DJs,” Matthew Glass, Grand Central president, recalls.
To plug two Lifetime investigative detective series, “Missing” and “Wild Card,” Grand Central brought in a polygraph expert with a hand-held device to subject station personnel for on-air grilling by their peers.
The ploy paid off in extended segments that blurred the line between promotion and programming. “Ad time is restricted to the amount of time being bought,” says Glass. “If there’s a good dynamic going on, it’s kind of like branded programming.”
Alternative rock station CIMX in Detroit recently ran a contest in which listeners registered online for a chance to win a trip to the “Maury Povich Show.” To compete, they had to tell a personal story about their boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse, and then call in to take a lie detector test about what they wrote.
“You want to stay topical,” says Cal Cagno, promotions director for CIMX. “You want cool, fresh prizing so people will listen to win it.”
Cagno says the station carefully considers what might be at the top of people’s wish lists, product like iPods or Xboxes.
And Web links aside, pushing that product online is the key to success, says Cagno: “You need them to be listeners first, and Web surfers second.”
Unlike most executives interviewed for this article, Abbie Korman, president of radio promotions agency Impact Marketing, believes stations might be putting too much emphasis on new media.
“They are damaging their own core business. The big radio operators are focusing too much on competitive and trying to force everything online and not just doing good radio.”
Broadcasters are also now being more demanding in the kind of prize packages they expect from advertisers, according to Korman. For example, a DVD giveaway typically now needs to be sweetened by a chance to meet the movie’s star. “A hat and a t-shirt used to get you a promotion,” she says. “Instead of a hat and a t-shirt, we have to give away a TV every day.”
Tom Barnes, CEO of radio promotions agency MediaThink, sees promotions as part of the “value-added calculus” that advertisers want from radio stations. He adds the use of new technology doesn’t trump creativity.
“There’s been very little in the way of reinvention. At the end of the day, there are no new ideas, just new ways to execute them.”
FROM THE ANNALS OF RADIO PROMOTIONS
Early radio marketing maverick Gordon McLendon ran a contest on Dallas station KLIF to give away a mountain — actually a tall hill on three acres in southeastern Texas.
