The promotion director of a certain large market radio station sent a memo to the station’s morning host, asking:
“Do you want me to type up a winner sheet for every contest you guys do in the morning, or can we do a generic one? Let me know your thoughts…”
The morning host — a very well-known, very successful, very professional veteran personality — replied as follows:
I need a winner sheet for each separate contest for several reasons.
1) Because of the immediacy of radio, things change quickly and at the last minute. Often sales-oriented contests have last-minute changes. This means that I need an updated form with specifics of each contest the day we start it. NOT TWO WEEKS AHEAD of time.
Since I do not attend the promotion meetings (because the morning host is not invited), I am not privy to the intricacies of each contest. That’s why I would appreciate:
A) An e-mail detailing the contest the day before it starts.
B) A contest sheet as a backup in the Prize Book as we previously discussed (on more than one occasion).
2) I need to know the contest has been approved, signed off on, and otherwise tweaked by you and the program director. Just because I talk to a salesperson does not, repeat, NOT mean that we are doing a contest.
Often I chat with salespeople to give them ideas on what we feasibly could do to help a client, but it is always subject to approval from the Promotions and Program Directors. That’s why I need a separate winner sheet for each contest.
3) Although we have listeners who win more than one contest, most of our winners are not aware of when a CD, movie ticket, concert ticket, etc., will be available — and if it isn’t, when they can pick it up. We have many prizes, and each contest is different.
Also, as far as concert tickets are concerned, we have had a problem in the past with overzealous DJs giving out more tickets than we have or listeners claiming that we have awarded them a prize when, in fact, we haven’t. Therefore, numbered sheets with jocks’ names on them in the case of hard-to-get tickets would be optimal. This is known in most businesses as Inventory Control.
On the other hand, if we have a movie house full of tickets, then I believe you could supply one sheet for the movie and we can make copies to give to the front desk.
4) The necessary items on each winner’s sheet should include (but not be limited to):
– Winner’s information
– A description of the prize
– How many of the prizes we have to give away (assuming it’s a purely morning show prize)
– Whether we need to get an aircheck for the client and/or sales department
– Whether a specific tag is needed for the client
– In the case of tickets, the date of the event
– Any other specifics of the event; e.g., other groups on the concert bill, or for a sporting event, the opposing team
– Whether the tickets/passes include any special type of entertainment: backstage, food, drink, etc.
– Whether you must be a certain age to get into the event (e.g., if liquor is served, you must be of age)
– If transportation is included, and if so, what it will be (limo, train tickets, etc). Also, whether we need to mention the transportation provider.
Now, that said, it shouldn’t be too much for the air personality to ask that the above items be specified in one or two easy-to-read paragraphs so that we can:
(1) Do a solicit with the first one over the beginning of a record
(2) Do the second one in a backsell briefly with the winner
You will need to somehow highlight the information that should be given to the winner but that does not need to be given over the air.
If this reply is too specific, it’s probably because I don’t feel I should be wasting my time with something like winner’s sheets and contest specifics that should be common sense to a promotion director in a market of this size.
Let’s move ahead because we have at least one major promotion a month with the morning show alone that we have to get on track, as well as the various weekend contests and standard giveaways that stations like ours do as a matter of course.
Cordially,
(NAME WITHHELD)
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I left Radio 2+ years ago. Program Dir. in medium-sized market, with different levels of stations and formats along the way. I’m happy to say that we covered the promo bases just like the major market morning guy asked. Most, if not, all of the time. After reading your blog, I’m wondering how a promo director with little experience or follow-thru or attention to detail or whatever, got to be at such a high place in a major Radio station. I say I wonder but I probably know the answer. Sad.
Wow…hope that Promotions Director was taking notes! Sounds like (s)he missed out on Promotions 101, the basics of doing the job correctly.
Over the years, I’ve worked with some wonderful Promotions Directors, and while things might have occasionally fallen through the cracks, the basics were adhered to. This poor morning guy was put in the position of having no tools to work with AND of having to tell the PromD how to do their job.
Not nice…
Too perfect, and yet another sign of people who don’t know what they’re doing getting jobs, and people who do getting laid off. The station where I work part-time has a lovely data base system that keeps track of not only the listeners who have won, but only has a specific allotment of each prize to give away, has on and off air details for the contest, and tells the jock if the prizes are in house or if they need to be called. There is so little work for the jock with these contests, we can focus on other things…like keeping our jobs!
If only most promotions directors did this. And -what’s more sad, if only more on air talent followed these instructions! I worked at a station where the PD was so desperate to find air talent – only he and the morning show were paid full time and everyone else was paid low wages – that he allowed many mistakes to go past including not filling out required information on the winners sheets. His reasoning – he was just happy the ATs showed up for their air shifts.
Can you guess what the station’s ratings were?
I work for a mid-sized radio station as a promotions assistant. It seems to me that my boss makes tehse kinds of mistakes constantly. He leaves his job up to his inferiours and refuses to specify how he wants things done.. he expects us to “know how to do it”… in short, hes a dick and i hate him
I have always been an entertainer with a “great voice”. This has nothing to do with the topic above, but I can relate to the sudden change radio has. I have been hired as an on-air host/promotions director and I work 20 hours a week. I love what I do, but I feel so stressed out because I wear 20 different hats with no time to do any of them. My boss says he really doesn’t give a d+++n about my voice, its about what the Program Director says. Might I add, my boss lives in Florida, the PD lives Rochester, and I live where the station is, Albany. I just want to ask, is it unusual to be an on air host/promotions director in this business?