• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Radio Contest Promotions: When Was The LAST Time...?

T

thenetwork

...One SINGLE* radio station in Cleveland had a LOCAL**, LIMITED RUN*** Contest Promotion that brought a lot of eyes and ears to the radio station?

* -- NOT a simple contest where their sister station in the room next door was also running as well.

** -- NOT a contest that multiple company-owned stations across the country were running at the exact same time -- sometimes under different contest names -- for the same single prize,

*** -- Not a contest that continued to run ad nauseam for years (Like WMJI's Cash Bribe Oldie of the Day).

Probably have to go back quite a ways. But man, those were the days!
 
WNWV 107.3 regularly does local contests that are alternative-focused and separate from their Akron-focused sister stations. They often do ticket contests on the air (not just their website). Probably not what you are talking about because these are likely ticket tradeouts and not costing the station cash, but WNWV does do a decent amount of local promotions.
 
While I suspect that Star 102's ticket giveaways might be multi-city, given the times to enter, they're not the same thing all the time. The last one was TSO, and Eric Clapton before that, plus a couple of weeks ago, it was tickets for the Crocker Park Wine Festival.

Now, the days of public appearances randomly around town might be behind us. That's a different issue than contests. I think centralizing them might be easier on the stations than having to have someone manning the phones looking for Caller 92 to 216-578-0092. If you funnel everything through one central marketing department, there's less cause for people suing the station for rigging a contest. Who's going to take on the behemoth of iHeartRadio, when they even include the station-emulating streams in their $1000 daily giveaway?
 
Stations do still give away smaller items locally but the costs associated with larger ticket items such as fly-a-ways etc are pretty much 100% national at this point - the advertising dollars are not there to fund (or trade) for such big giveaways in each market.
 
xmusicmatt said:
Stations do still give away smaller items locally but the costs associated with larger ticket items such as fly-a-ways etc are pretty much 100% national at this point - the advertising dollars are not there to fund (or trade) for such big giveaways in each market.
Click to expand...
100% this. Plus you’re already talking about 1-2 full generations of new radio listeners (such as it is) since the late 1990s consolidations; the era of such grand contests is pretty much gone and I doubt the average listener really cares.

Also I disagree with the OP: the long-running giveaways like WMJI’s Cash Bribe Oldie should count as they were both brilliantly executed and compelled people to tune in (WNWV’s Trip-A-Day Giveway also counts as it was very effective and ran a long, long time.) But WMJI had the money and the budget with OmniAmerica that has never existed since.

It’s a different world today.
 
Phil Harmonic said:
The corporation and the lawyers have put a chill on the thrill...
Click to expand...
No, a decline of nearly 70% in radio revenues (inflation adjusted) in the last 20 years has required cutbacks everywhere.

(Stations have always been owned by corporations and they have always had lawyers.)
 
best local contest was WMJI's "Cash Bribe Oldie". Sounded huge. Run daily, Monday-Sunday, at least one winner a day of $105. One $5K winner per quarter. Sometimes two. Ran for about 10 years as a local contest, never a sponsor. Then it was compromised by CC and made into a national contest. I don't believe it's been run in any form by WMJI, or IHR, since early 2004. I have an old WMJI CB promo, and a bunch of the national contesting imaging, workparts, etc, produced around the country. #digitalpackrat
 
Then the stations started this B.S. of "Congratulations on winning a months supply of coupons for Nair. Please drag your ass down to our studios to pick up your prize" instead of mailing it to you like in the old days. Nowadays, if they tell you to do that, you'd have to set aside about three days, book a flight to their studio hub in Buttwipe, Nebraska, hope your flight doesn't get diverted to Moosekill, Alaska and be at the studio between 2 and 5 pm to be handed your "winnings" by the chief engineer/janitor if he's not busy unclogging a toilet or re-installing Windows XP on the computer so it can play "Freebird" 378 times more that week.
 
I used to win a lot of stuff from Denny Sanders when he was doing the evening shift on WMJI. And also from Bruce Ryan on his Sunday night oldies show on WLTF. But that was a long time ago. Recently, I have been winning stuff from WTAM. In fact, I just won tickets to a Guardians game a couple weeks ago.
 
skiwest said:
I used to win a lot of stuff from Denny Sanders when he was doing the evening shift on WMJI. And also from Bruce Ryan on his Sunday night oldies show on WLTF. But that was a long time ago. Recently, I have been winning stuff from WTAM. In fact, I just won tickets to a Guardians game a couple weeks ago.
Click to expand...
 
Did you have to go pick them up or you going to have to go to a "will call" window at the ballpark?

I can't remember the DJ from WMJI but I think he had Mike Olszewski on and were doing a "Stump the DJs" trivia and I nailed them with "What was the song on the reverse side of "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Ha" [for the record, same song but in reverse with the label even printed backwards]. Anyhow, they said that was too obscure, blah, blah, blah, we're not going to allow it. I whined like a 4 year old, they relented and I got a WMJI coffee cup that they actually MAILED to me.
 
Nathan Obral said:
100% this. Plus you’re already talking about 1-2 full generations of new radio listeners (such as it is) since the late 1990s consolidations; the era of such grand contests is pretty much gone and I doubt the average listener really cares.

Also I disagree with the OP: the long-running giveaways like WMJI’s Cash Bribe Oldie should count as they were both brilliantly executed and compelled people to tune in (WNWV’s Trip-A-Day Giveway also counts as it was very effective and ran a long, long time.) But WMJI had the money and the budget with OmniAmerica that has never existed since.

It’s a different world today.
Click to expand...
Was that by chance a knockoff of "The Last Contest?"
 
I can remember Lanigan going off on a rant because as he was talking about something he was all of a sudden cut off by the intrusion of a national sounder for ClearChannel/Iheart/We Destroyed Radio corporation [or whatever they were calling themselves at that time] "Call in now and be the 673rd caller to 1-800-XXX-XXXX for your chance to win $1,000, a bowl of Friskies and a loofah" and when they cam out of that sounder, he just went off about it for a solid minute or two. Basically about taking a local contest, taking it national where instead of a few hundreds or thousands local people maybe having a chance to win to a national contest where hundreds of thousands to millions are trying to call in where nobody local stands a remote chance in hell of winning.
 
"WMJI had the money and the budget with OmniAmerica.". Clearly you never worked for OmniAmerica, lol! I'll cite the Christmas bonuses for starters.. supermarket trade/coupons, restaurant trade, and others like movie passes. Never rec'd $$$. Apparently all went for the CB. WMJI never had any real promotional $$$ until Nationwide. My post above stated "never a sponsor". I'll recant as I think we started to add sponsors in promos near the end of the local run of the contest, under Nationwide. I dunno... it's been 25 years since I left MJI.... gets hazy. My radio "Camelot".
 
Last edited:
Yabadabado1 said:
I can remember Lanigan going off on a rant because as he was talking about something he was all of a sudden cut off by the intrusion of a national sounder for ClearChannel/Iheart/We Destroyed Radio corporation [or whatever they were calling themselves at that time] "Call in now and be the 673rd caller to 1-800-XXX-XXXX for your chance to win $1,000, a bowl of Friskies and a loofah" and when they cam out of that sounder, he just went off about it for a solid minute or two. Basically about taking a local contest, taking it national where instead of a few hundreds or thousands local people maybe having a chance to win to a national contest where hundreds of thousands to millions are trying to call in where nobody local stands a remote chance in hell of winning.
Click to expand...
Langian would not put up with any shit. When he left WMJI, it was the final departure of the last of the major adult personalities on Cleveland radio.
 


Back
Top Bottom