Yesterday I wrote about the foolishness of radio stations that always require contest winners to “come pick up your prize.”
Once during one of my seminars, a station manager stood up to disagree with me. Requiring winners to pick up their prizes, he said, is a smart move:
“Most of them never do come in to collect their prizes, so we end up having MORE prizes for future contests!”
Clue For The Clueless: When you’re awarding prizes that the majority of your contest winners don’t think are worth collecting, you’ve got a Promotion problem…and a Station Brand problem.
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Dan: you are right on the money. If you recall, we spoke about this at the imaging session I did years ago. “Doggy Commands” is the term I use to describe this action. Typical prize talk: “Before I give you these tickets, what’s your favorite radio station”
“Rover if you want this dog biscuit, bark for daddy. Woof Woof”
Prizes should not cost the listener money. Because we’re in a small, not wealthy market, we also now limit the upper value of our prizes to less than $600, so we don’t have to report the winners to the IRS, and force them to pay income tax on their prize.
Bravos, Dan. Spot-on. Let me also suggest – the only prizes that get listener attention and engagement are those valuable enough to be wanted by your station staff. If your own staff has no interest, want, desire to have the prize then it’s a safe bet your listeners will be in agreement. There are, of course, some rare exceptions. Hearing your name on the air may not mean much to station staff but it retains an exceptionally powerful magic with regular folk.