Radio Contests that went Awry

[kwthom]

Oooh - famous one here in the Cactus patch, back in the 1970's...KIKX 580, Tucson:

Wikipedia: "A 1974 promotion gone wrong would ultimately be the catalyst for the station's demise. The promotion announced the kidnapping of one of the station's DJs, Gary Craig (real name Arthur Gopen), who at that time had taken over KIKX's morning show; the intention was that Craig would "disappear", call into the station from Miami, and then call in from various cities on his way back to Tucson, with lucky listeners who were able to identify the cities winning prizes."

Eight years of wrangling between the owner and the FCC via the courts on that one before the station shut down.

 

[Mediafrog+]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I'm not sure I get how calling into the station from a nearby restaurant would give him an edge over other callers?

Years ago with what would now be considered rather primitive switching equipment, the fewer exchanges/central offices a call had to be routed through the faster the call could be completed. A caller close to the station would go through only one switching center which served both.

 

[ZantennaG1]

I think this leans more toward TV, but Pepsi is like the king of screwing up their promos, particularly in the 1990's when they printed too many winning bottles, LOL.

 

[oldradiotapes]

KRNA had a call in contest and by the 3rd (of 4, IIRC) call in time, so many people picked up their (landline) phones that there was no dial tone in Iowa City for 3 to 4 minutes.

This couldn't happen with cell phones. How would this happen with landlines because there was no cell phones back in the 80s. Would the telephone lines just get overloaded if everyone tried to dial a call at the same time?

Local congestion was a big problem with step-by-step and crossbar systems of which there still were many in the 1980s. Step offices had only a finite number of line finders and crossbar or ESS MDPRs/originating registers could only access a certain number of dial tone trunks before being overloaded and putting outbound callers into a queue. This wasn't limited to major areas with contesting radio stations. Some smaller places, like developing cities in the Best Coast, simply had insufficient and outdated equipment to handle the increasing amount of normal local traffic. Mark Bernay (Richard Kashdan) commented on this problem during his west Oregon phone trip in late one-niner-six-niner:

http://wideweb.com/phonetrips/oregon1.mp3

http://wideweb.com/phonetrips/oregon2.mp3

Contest traffic was part of why geographic choke exchanges (e.g. 212-955 in lower Manhattan) were established in larger areas, to take the load off the regular public network. That was also the reason for AT$T's original implementation of non-geographic, inward WATS NPA 900, which handled traffic for a nationwide CBS radio interview with Jimmy Carter in 1977, relieving the 800 INWATS network. That was before 900 became the exclusive domain of scammers and ripoff numbers.

And yes, there were cell phones in the 80s. They were so expensive and coverage was so limited that most people didn't have them (and society in general was a lot better off). Congestion definitely does happen in wireless networks, especialy in places where major disasters are occurring and everybody flocks to the telephone all at once in panic. Bandwidth is limited and when all trunks going out of a mobile switch/gateway are engaged, you're SOL until a channel opens up.

That's kind of an overly simplistic explanation of it all, and I'm sure I've left out a few critical details, but it's my day off and I haven't had brekky yet.

 

[Deleted User]

In Boston, many stations had a 931 exchange, which was in the 617 area code

a few stations still uses the phone numbers people associated with them for listener call ins, etc

WBZ AM was iirc 254-1030

WRKO was 266 6868

WBCN FM was 536 8000

but contests were always done on a "contest line" with a 931 prefix

 

[michael hagerty]

Yes.

That is why the telco in LA created a separate exchange for radio stations which lasted through the 90's. If a station got huge contest participation, the worst that would happen is that the separate exchange would go down but emergency calls and the like in the rest of the metro would not be affected.

They had had too many big radio contests take down whole exchanges so they came up with a solution.

And that didn't necessarily launch smoothly. I had an aircheck (made the mistake of loaning it to a friend 45 years ago and never got it back) of Robert W. Morgan on the first day of the new exchange.

KHJ had secured 520-1970 through at least 520-1980. Dialing any number between would get you through. But their plan was to use the number corresponding to the year for promotion. Pacific Telephone gave them the block of numbers in the spring of 1969.

On the first day (April 15, 1969), it didn't work. People calling the new Bossline at 520-1970 (for L.A. and the Valley) couldn't get through. It wouldn't even ring. So they called in on the Orange County Line (a toll call for them in those days) to let Morgan know.

Morgan then did what Morgan did. Spent an hour reading the promos every ten minutes, just like the memo said, but adding a touch at the end: "The new Bossline number for Los Angeles and the Valley is 520-1970. But I wouldn't risk a dime in a pay phone." The punchline changed with each promo.

After that hour, Morgan said that he had done something regrettable---in his anger over the screwup with the Bossline, he had taken the telephone handset and smashed it into the panel of buttons for the Bosslines. And now they wouldn't stay down. Which meant he couldn't take any more phone calls. It also meant he couldn't make a call out himself. Like to Pacific Telephone service, which opened at 8.

"So if just one of you could please call the Pacific Telephone service line at (number) and tell them the Bossline is broken....."

And so it came to pass that on the very first day of dedicated broadcast exchanges in Los Angeles----Robert W. Morgan took down several exchanges in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.

 

[michael hagerty]

Speaking of KHJ, they had three contests that went spectacularly bad. Each deserves its own post.

In 1969, the "Birthday Payday" contest celebrating KHJ's fourth anniversary as "Boss Radio". Each hour, KHJ would announce some sort of historic event, but withhold the date. If you were whatever number caller, you told them your birthday (month and day) and if your birthday matched the date of the historical event, which they'd announce on the air, you won whatever the jackpot was.

It launched on Wednesday afternoon, April 30 with $2,500 ($18,801 in today's money) and went up by ten bucks each time they had a loser.

Their winner happened overnight Friday night into Saturday morning, May 3. $2,920. Too soon, too little, wrong daypart. Sucks for promotion, so KHJ figures it's worth it to re-launch the contest with another $2,500 Monday morning.

A second winner 45 hours after re-launch---$2,950. Again in overnights on May 7.

So, KHJ, made of money in those days, decides to roll the dice one more time, and re-set the jackpot to $2,500, with ten bucks added each hour until the jackpot is won.

And every hour of every day for the rest of the May---nobody wins. By May 30, the jackpot is $8,020 ($60,150.66 in today's money). On the back of the May 28 Boss 30, there's a promo that reads:

"On July 16, 1969, the United States is scheduled to rocket the first man to the moon! If the "Birthday Payday" jackpot hasn't been won by then, it'll be worth $18,230 in KHJ cash!"

That, by the way, is $135,240 in today's money.

The trouble is that the official rules for the contest didn't give an end date.

What happened after that is lost to history.

Robert W. Morgan and the Real Don Steele walked out after their shifts on May 30 in an attempt to get a raise (didn't work---Steele came back in a month, Morgan held out for two months). The station put its promotional muscle behind Charlie Tuna in mornings and Humble Harve in afternoons as "KHJ's Summer Fun Schedule". There's no mention of KHJ's Birthday Payday on a Boss 30 survey after May 28.

There's a gap in airchecks of KHJ between May 30, where the contest is still going on (and Sam Riddle even jokes about it) and June 11, where it's not.

There was almost certainly a winner. The stakes were too high and RKO too visible to risk the lawsuit. But who and when are answers I can't find.

 

[michael hagerty]

The second disastrous KHJ contest was a year later---July of 1970. KHJ's Super Summer Spectacular. The budget for the month was $40,000 ($280,000 today). They gave away a dune buggy and cash, sending KHJ jocks out in the city, and giving out clues to where you could find them. Teenagers drove recklessly to reach The Real Don Steele on July 16 and one died.

The family sued KHJ for $300,000 and won. RKO had it overturned on appeal. Here's the case law:

Weirum v. RKO General, Inc.

Weirum v. RKO General, Inc., Supreme Court of California

law.justia.com

 

[michael hagerty]

The third was KHJ's version of the "Visible Vault". I think they called theirs the "See-Through Safe".

It was a clear plexiglass box with several thousand dollars inside, and a digital touchpad (like a phone) for a combination lock. They put it on display at a local mall for a week, complete with Brinks guards, and gave clues as to what the combination might be.

Then there's a big event at the mall. KHJ knows what the combination is, and watches as a woman enters a different combination and the vault opens. Charlie Van Dyke is PD at the time. He, Paul Drew and the lawyers huddle, tech folks examine the keypad and lock and the answer is---"She didn't cheat. There was some screwup. Pay her the money and we'll do the contest a second time."

Unlike Birthday Payday, this one didn't drag on, but by 1975, RKO had less of a sense of humor about paying out twice what they'd planned.

 

[Mikey Radio]

Then there's a big event at the mall. KHJ knows what the combination is, and watches as a woman enters a different combination and the vault opens. Charlie Van Dyke is PD at the time. He, Paul Drew and the lawyers huddle, tech folks examine the keypad and lock and the answer is---"She didn't cheat. There was some screwup. Pay her the money and we'll do the contest a second time."

At least they were honest about it, acknowledged the technical glitch with the combination and lock system and paid the woman. I still recall hearing about a lottery winner a few years back who's scratch off clearly showed they won, but the lottery commission tried to deny the payout, saying there was a misprint and the barcode their system needs to read didn't match. I don't recall the outcome, but IMO the lottery didn't have a strong argument. If a particular scratch game explains what you must scratch and find to win, and you've clearly done that, their barcoding system should be secondary if it matters at all. On the other hand if it was proven someone was printing fraudulent scratch games in an effort to cheat the system, that's a different story.

 

[kfbkfb]

Sliding OT...I recommend the (1967) movie "The President's Analyst" (writing more might give away the plot).


Kirk Bayne

 

[Kent]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I'm not sure I get how calling into the station from a nearby restaurant would give him an edge over other callers?

One of the stations where I worked would give out its request line, which was a rollover number. I found out while working one night that the actual number was one digit off from Animal Control's phone number.

I always thought, if I were participating in a station contest, I'd want that number. Not sure if would still matter today, but, at one time, calling the actual number instead of the rollover gave you a very slight advantage at getting through. The station's staff hasn't turned over much since I left. One person has been there pretty much his whole career, while another one left for a bigger market only to return a few years later. The current midday host and PD is the person who replaced me in a lesser position more than 17 years ago at that cluster and is still a friend. So, there's still no point in me trying to call in on a contest. Friends and family of employees aren't eligible to win!

 

[michael hagerty]

KFRC, San Francisco also had a classic contest screw-up. Spring 1968, and they're giving away a brand-new Jaguar XKE. $5,352 without any options, and the car KFRC had was probably $6,000. $47,800 in today's money (which now makes me think XKE's were more reasonable than I thought they were back in the day).

Anyway, the contest was that the KFRC disc jockeys, after their shifts, would drive around San Francisco and the jock-on air would give clues as to the route that day's jock was taking. Figure out the clues, guess closest to the correct mileage at the end of the seven days (one day for each jock), and you win the car.

All good until the first Saturday of the contest when noon to 3 jock Howard Clark, on his way to Fisherman's Wharf, goes through an intersection that had no stop signs and crashes into a Corvair going through the intersection on the cross-street.

Miraculously, nobody hurt. XKE a total loss. Clark, who said he was sober but probably speeding at the time of the crash, calls the engineer at the station, tells him to call the PD (Les Turpin) and tell him he's totaled the Jag. And then goes to Enrico's in North Beach to get drunk.

Turpin got the news at the country club where he was playing golf, punched a wall and broke his hand.

KFRC got another XKE (like KHJ, it was an RKO General station and had money to work with), re-started the contest, with Turpin himself taking Clark's place in the rotation of jocks driving the car, and gave it away without incident.

Clark was shortly afterward moved to overnights. He stayed for a year and then went home to Shreveport, Louisiana.

 

[Phil Harmonic]

KFRC, San Francisco also had a classic contest screw-up. Spring 1968, and they're giving away a brand-new Jaguar XKE. $5,352 without any options, and the car KFRC had was probably $6,000. $47,800 in today's money (which now makes me think XKE's were more reasonable than I thought they were back in the day).

Anyway, the contest was that the KFRC disc jockeys, after their shifts, would drive around San Francisco and the jock-on air would give clues as to the route that day's jock was taking. Figure out the clues, guess closest to the correct mileage at the end of the seven days (one day for each jock), and you win the car.

All good until the first Saturday of the contest when noon to 3 jock Howard Clark, on his way to Fisherman's Wharf, goes through an intersection that had no stop signs and crashes into a Corvair going through the intersection on the cross-street.

Miraculously, nobody hurt. XKE a total loss. Clark, who said he was sober but probably speeding at the time of the crash, calls the engineer at the station, tells him to call the PD (Les Turpin) and tell him he's totaled the Jag. And then goes to Enrico's in North Beach to get drunk.

Turpin got the news at the country club where he was playing golf, punched a wall and broke his hand.

KFRC got another XKE (like KHJ, it was an RKO General station and had money to work with), re-started the contest, with Turpin himself taking Clark's place in the rotation of jocks driving the car, and gave it away without incident.

Clark was shortly afterward moved to overnights. He stayed for a year and then went home to Shreveport, Louisiana.

Hey Michael, thanks for those cool radio stories!

 

[b-turner]

When I was working at a Top 40 in the 1980s in Bryan/College Station, Texas, the station managed to get a new car from a local dealership. It was a nice vehicle, popular model and all the bells and whistles. We put the car on display at the local mall. We filled the car with wrapped gifts, 24 in all, from mall merchants. By the car was a booth the station set up and manned most hours during the lengthy contest that stretched for about 6 weeks.

The contest worked this way: If someone got the exact amount including all taxes and fees, the car and all that was in it went to the winner. It obviously created quite a stir. At the booth we had a sheet of paper with the rules on the back and on the front, all of the 24 prizes were listed (yes, the exact content of each wrapped gift). Everybody that came up was offered the sheet. The car with actual VIN number was listed as well. All the person had to do is walk around the mall and ask the people in participating stores the cost of the item with tax. Then for the car, if they'd walk on the lot and ask the price with tax and all other charges, they would tell you. Simply do a bit of footwork, add up the amounts and you win or have a chance since more than one would have the right amount, we presumed.

This was about 1985 or so, so the total of almost $25,000 was pretty significant. It was well more than I made in a year at the station.

In fact, the merchants and car dealer felt so many would be asking almost all of them put up a sign with the exact dollar amount including tax. The car dealer did the same. So, literally a little footwork was all it took. Just write down the numbers.

After, I think about 6 weeks, we had tons of entries but none were the correct answer. Not one listener would walk the mall and stop by the car dealer to win it all. In fact quite a few listeners visiting the booth complained about it being too much work

We had no contingency plan. After 6 weeks we ended the contest and drew at random 24 entries to win one of the gifts in the mall. The car went back to the dealer.

The lasting impression: we were the station that didn't give away the car like we said we'd do and/or the station that made it impossible to win. The lesson learned was make it effortless because listeners generally won't 'try' to win if it takes any effort.

 

[oldradiotapes]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I'm not sure I get how calling into the station from a nearby restaurant would give him an edge over other callers?

Until the mid-1980s, the North American section of the Public Switched Telephone Network had been laid out in an hierarchical fashion. Local central offices (end offices, which customer telephones are connected to -- e.g. ORCHWA01DS0) homed on larger sectional tandem offices, which may have homed on larger offices yet, which were connected to even bigger regional toll centres for distance trunk calling. Often interlocal calls were switched between local access tandems inside local COs and a call in a large area, like New York City, may have to go through several mechanical exchanges before reaching their destination, which meant routes could sometimes take up to thirty seconds (if not longer) to set up depending on the destination and normal traffic load.

Many interoffice trunks until the mid-1960s used single-frequency (2600 Hz) pulsing or loop-break pulsing ("dial pulsing"), the latter of which is, literally, the CO or tandem automatic rotary dialling the destination number into a distant exchange at a nominal 10 pulses per second -- basically the same method used by rotary telephones. (This may be hard to believe from today's perspective, but AT&T really did this in a lot of places, and there was a time when it was one of the standard interoffice signalling protocols used throughout the PSTN.) Fast revertive and dial pulsing did fix the slow call setup problem somewhat. Signalling System 5 (multi-frequency signalling - a.k.a. blue boxes (ask Woz about that next time you see him!)) sped up the process even more but the network structure itself was still a stumbling point, especially with time-sensitive calling like radio contests. This is why calling from a number in the same physical exchange, or in the same building on a different exchange, gave callers an advantage - there were simply fewer switching points the call would have to be routed through.

This all became obsolete and irrelevant when Signalling System 6 (common-channel interoffice signalling) came about at end of the 1970s, ultimately transitioning the world to ISDN and its super-fast SS7, replacing CCIS and MF and making dial pulsing extinct in most places. Least-cost routing, a concept which digital trunk systems made practical and came into prevalence in the 1990s, also meant dismantling the network's hierarchy for the most part. This lessened the need for intermediate switching points, minimising setup time and enabling more direct end-to-end connections. Local/interlocal calls today ring almost immediately and coast-to-coast calls rarely take more than a couple seconds to connect. Local COs do still home on sectional toll centres for long distance calling (e.g. if you are in VANCWA01DS0 and want to call New York, you still go through PTLDOR13C9T since it is West Vancouver's long distance access point) but routes are nowhere as lengthy or cumbersome as they once were. Nowadays somebody in, say, Australia could be listening to a stream from New York and have a similar chance of winning the station's contest as somebody living across the road from the station's CO.

 

[michael hagerty]

When I was working at a Top 40 in the 1980s in Bryan/College Station, Texas, the station managed to get a new car from a local dealership. It was a nice vehicle, popular model and all the bells and whistles. We put the car on display at the local mall. We filled the car with wrapped gifts, 24 in all, from mall merchants. By the car was a booth the station set up and manned most hours during the lengthy contest that stretched for about 6 weeks.

The contest worked this way: If someone got the exact amount including all taxes and fees, the car and all that was in it went to the winner. It obviously created quite a stir. At the booth we had a sheet of paper with the rules on the back and on the front, all of the 24 prizes were listed (yes, the exact content of each wrapped gift). Everybody that came up was offered the sheet. The car with actual VIN number was listed as well. All the person had to do is walk around the mall and ask the people in participating stores the cost of the item with tax. Then for the car, if they'd walk on the lot and ask the price with tax and all other charges, they would tell you. Simply do a bit of footwork, add up the amounts and you win or have a chance since more than one would have the right amount, we presumed.

This was about 1985 or so, so the total of almost $25,000 was pretty significant. It was well more than I made in a year at the station.

In fact, the merchants and car dealer felt so many would be asking almost all of them put up a sign with the exact dollar amount including tax. The car dealer did the same. So, literally a little footwork was all it took. Just write down the numbers.

After, I think about 6 weeks, we had tons of entries but none were the correct answer. Not one listener would walk the mall and stop by the car dealer to win it all. In fact quite a few listeners visiting the booth complained about it being too much work

We had no contingency plan. After 6 weeks we ended the contest and drew at random 24 entries to win one of the gifts in the mall. The car went back to the dealer.

The lasting impression: we were the station that didn't give away the car like we said we'd do and/or the station that made it impossible to win. The lesson learned was make it effortless because listeners generally won't 'try' to win if it takes any effort.

KHJ did a similar contest in March of 1970---"Heavy Wheels". The promo said they took a 1970 Pontiac Firebird Formula 400, loaded it "with all the Boss Jocks and a load of coin cash and put it on a scale." Uh-huh. SEVEN guys in a Firebird. Anyway, you guess the notarized official weight of the car, the jocks and the cash total, and you win the car and the money. RKO paid cash for the car.

Six years later, same radio group---RKO General---decides to do "An Arrow A Day For The Month Of May" at KFRC, San Francisco---31 1976 Plymouth Arrows (here's a picture: Hatch Heaven » Plymouth Arrow : 1976 ), a Mitsubishi import (before Mitsu had their own U.S. dealers) rebadged as a Plymouth. Base price was $3,175, so that's $98,425 for the cars. I doubt they all were without options, so figure it could add up to $125,000-ish. That needed to be a tradeout---and Daly City Chrysler-Plymouth ads ran on KFRC every hour for the next six months. That probably drove away more people than the promotion attracted.

As for your lasting impression---yep. In late 1976, KTNQ (The New TenQ) launched, going head-to-head against KHJ. They didn't even bother crafting a launch promotion. They just did instant winners. Call in to request a song and maybe you'll be one---a T-shirt, a hit album, cash (which they called "WAM---Walkin' around money"). And the kids were infinitely more excited by the chance that they might make a request and get $100 than they ever would be trying to solve a puzzle.

 

[davideduardo]

After that hour, Morgan said that he had done something regrettable---in his anger over the screwup with the Bossline, he had taken the telephone handset and smashed it into the panel of buttons for the Bosslines. And now they wouldn't stay down. Which meant he couldn't take any more phone calls. It also meant he couldn't make a call out himself. Like to Pacific Telephone service, which opened at 8.

Ah, yes. Those who worked with Morgan, particularly engineers, have plenty of stories about something he did or said "in his anger".

 

[kfbkfb]

April 5

^^^
...totally demolished the Jag XKE...

(just found this)


Kirk Bayne

 

[michael hagerty]

Ah, yes. Those who worked with Morgan, particularly engineers, have plenty of stories about something he did or said "in his anger".

You could fill a book with “bad boy” Morgan stories.