Welcome to a new century! Last year the MPR’s of Programming dealt with all the M’s on this alphabetical programming checklist. In review, the MPR’s are set up to help a radio station analyze it’s Music, Morning Show, Marketing, Management/Morale, Promotions, Production, Positioning, Personalities, Research, Ratings, and Revenue.

This time around we turn our attention to Promotions, the first "P" on the list of MPR’s. We’ll look at the basics of doing radio station Promotions effectively. The first thing we need to explore is the basic definition of promotions, and how it differs from marketing your radio station.

While marketing and promotion are very often grouped together, there is a distinct difference between the two. While marketing is primarily a function "off the air" to get listeners to sample your radio station, promotions are what station’s use "on the air" to get listeners who’ve begun sampling a station to stay and listen longer.

While many effective promotions are indeed done "on site" at locations away from the radio station, their primary function is usually one of bolstering listener loyalty through participating in contests or activities tailored to keep a radio station’s core listener’s active.

What kinds of promotions are you doing to keep your listeners tuned in for longer periods of time? Are your contests and giveaways effective? Is there a healthy balance of TSL and Cume-driven promotions? Are you doing programming-driven promotions with true "listener benefits" or is your station primarily filled with sales-driven promotions?

Before we delve into these key questions, let’s take a look at the basic foundation for setting up effective radio station promotions.

A key strategy for setting up a basic promotion is to make sure that you conduct your promotion or contest, not necessarily for the people who enter them, but for the 90% of all listeners who will never enter them. It’s important to note that research shows that nine out of ten of your listeners will never participate in a station promotion, either phoning, writing, e-mailing, or going out to a contest or promotion "on-site".

For every contest or promotion you conduct, 90% of your audience will have very little to do with it other than listen to it and they must deem it enjoyable for the promotion to succeed. Keeping this basic promotion tenet in mind, here are some rules for a contest or promotion that involves active players but also keeps non-participatory diarykeepers entertained:

1. Keep it Simple…..many contests don’t work effectively because they complicate the basic issues. They make it too difficult to win. If you’re making your listeners jump through impossible hoops to participate in your contest or promotion, you’re doing your radio station a disservice. In this age of high tech excess, when listener’s are constantly bombarded by hard sell impressions, the simpler you make your promotion the better.
2. Many Chances to Win….make sure there are ample opportunities for your listeners to win. Contests or promotions that give away large sums of money or huge prizes with few chances to win very often get lumped into "impossible to win" scenarios like the state lottery. Expensive contests or promotions don’t create much staying power for a radio station because their grand prize is not seen as something achievable by the typical listener.
3. Build Consistency and Accessibility….listeners have to perceive they have the opportunity to play the contest or promotion even if they have no intention of doing so. Don’t create a situation where the typical listener has to try several hundred times to just "get in the game" because either the times for the promotion aren’t consistent or it’s not easily accessible to enter. While the active contest entrant will bear down and give your contest a go, the more typical listener who might casually participate probably won’t.
4. Make it Fun….remember that this is the entertainment industry and not Publisher’s Clearing House. Build elements into your contest or promotion that are enjoyable to both players and non players. At the very least, make sure the produced elements of the promotion are creatively done with a sense of humor.
5. Create Benchmarks….the most effective promotions are not isolated events. If you know you have a strong contest or promotion, try to build it into a benchmark for your radio station. On the television side, look at what ABC has done with their monstrous game show "Who wants to be a millionaire?". The popularity of this show has become a major benchmark for the network. Whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, or annually, having a benchmark contest or promotion for your radio station creates strong top of mind awareness that leads to positive ratings.

There are two primary types of station promotions that can benefit from the rules of promotions noted above. Here is a look at the basic differences between Cume and TSL driven promotions:

Cume Promotions: These are major mass appeal giveaways and promotions that are created to get people to just listen! Many CHR, Country, AC and other Cume driven formats are famous for doing major cash, car, and trip giveaways as a way to drive heavy cume usage to a radio station.

KIIS-FM in Los Angeles has successfully driven strong cume to their radio station by giving away upwards of $25,000 cash and Porshe’s to create a benchmark as Southern California’s most generous radio station.

I was involved in one of the most effective Cume promotions that I can recall while I was programming KLOL in Houston back in 1990. For their 20^th anniversary, the station not only gave away FIVE corvettes during the Spring book, but conveniently stashed $20,000 in the glove compartment of one of the vehicles.

Listeners had to listen for the sound of the corvette engine starting and be the 101^st caller to win a corvette. This simple, powerful cume-driven promotion helped KLOL garner it’s largest cume and share in the history of rock radio in Houston.

Unfortunately, during the next rating period, KLOL’s ratings dropped back to their normal averages. The moral here is….while these major Cume promotions can be incredibly effective, the downside is the considerable fall-off of numbers in books when you’re not delivering the major goods.

TSL Promotions: These are basic core-driven giveaways to get a radio station’s active listener’s to listen longer! These TSL-driven promotions are popular with Rock, Urban, Alternative and other lifestyle formats as a way to get their core listener’s to participate for longer Average Quarter Hour periods with their radio station.

Alternative rocker Live 105 in San Francisco has had much success with doing a TSL promotion called "Trippin’ Tuesday’s" where every Tuesday they give away core concert trips to Alternative rock concerts around the country.

Listener’s register their names via e-mail and snail mail and listen every Tuesday while the station qualifies several names between 9a and 5p. One lucky winner is picked from the qualifiers to jet somewhere around the country to catch one of the format’s hottest new bands "live". This TSL driven promotion has proven to be a strong benchmark for Active and Alternative rock stations across the land.

There are other effective TSL promotions like listening for the "Song of the Day" to win core station music and qualify for cash and trips. Another great TSL promotion that has become very popular with active listener’s of lifestyle formats are "Payroll" promotions, where listener’s get awarded cash as a form of paying them to work as a loyal listener for the radio station.

One of the biggest challenges a radio station promotion director faces is taking the hundreds of mundane sales promotions and making them effectively work with the "listener benefits" that programming-driven promotions afford. There is no doubt that today’s revenue demands have put a premium on doing promotions that add to a radio station’s bottom line.

While the revenue generated from doing sales or "value-added" promotions can be quite substantial, the key question that should always be discussed among the programming and sales department is…"what’s in it for the listener?"

A heavy dose of purely sales driven promotions without any listener benefits can actually create ratings decreases that will hurt the station’s bottom line more substantially than any of the potential revenue generated. The most effective sales promotions should always synergize the programming and sales efforts creating a win for clients AND listeners.

While I was programming KSJO in San Jose in the late 80’s, our promotion department developed "Solid Rock Patrol’s" which were basically a programming twist on a typical retail sales promotion. The station would send different jocks out to various client locations in the market for a 90 minute on-site appearance complete with the usual call-in’s and station prizes as well as certificates from the client.

These promotions effectively positioned a typical sales promotion as a programming driven appearance. With this spirit of creating and executing sale’s promotions with "listener benefits", you can potentially come up with promotion ideas that’ll even make a lube job sound exciting.

Charity Promotions

While TSL, Cume, and Sales Promotions are usually the norm at a radio station, I’ve always been a big proponent of creating charitable promotions as a station benchmark. I’ve programmed or consulted radio stations that have successfully done "All-Request Radiothons", "Rock and Roll Up Your Sleeve Blood Drives", and "Pet Adoption" or "Animal Rights" promotions.

These charitable promotions that give back to the community are effective ways to make a difference and create the "good will" that images your radio station positively in your market. Remember…there’s nothing like a happy ending!