Question From A Reader:
Recently a “local”station began a contest called “Big Money Birthday Guarantee” in which they award $5,000 a day. They announce a birth date and the 100th person (or whatever number) born on that date to call in wins the $5,000. In actuality this “local” contest isn’t local at all. It’s a part of a nationwide collective contest run simultaneously on stations all over the country. Okay, not a big deal right? It gets tricky from here.
Another station (totally locally owned) runs a promo regarding a $94 a day contest they conduct, informing the public that the $5,000 contest isn’t being conducted by the other station but by a corporate conglomeration of stations nationally. No call letters were mentioned, just a little promo to inform local listeners that every one of their winners would be from a local community.
The $5,000 station retaliated thusly: The morning guy took one of the daily national winners’ phone calls and edited it to make it sound like he was actually the one giving the money away. No mention of community or location. (The winner was from the New York area. Hard to imagine she was listening to a Jackson, MS station). Granted, it was “creative” on his part, but the bottom line is he’s deceiving his listening audience. Am I the only one who has a problem with this?
Okay, let’s have some serious fun.
If I were the smaller, local competitor, I would hit them hard. I would “estimate” the odds of winning either contest:
According to the latest census, there are 115,243 people living here in Jackson, and each of them has an equal chance of winning $94 tomorrow morning on WXXX. Meanwhile, according to a pretty good guess made by one of the guys in our engineering department, the number of people living in cities where the national contest being heard on another station in town is being aired is approximately 153,789,425. Which contest do YOU think has the better chance of putting real money in YOUR pocket?
And:
When WXXX says we’ll give away cash every morning to a Jackson area listener, we mean it. When that other station says THEY’LL give away cash every morning, they’re lying. Strong words, we know. But true. Because THEY don’t give away ANY money… and despite what they want you to believe, so far NO ONE who lives in or anywhere near Jackson has won a penny from that other station’s “contest.” They won’t tell you the truth, so we will:
That other station is owned by a huge conglomerate of radio stations. We’ve got no problem with that. WXXX happens be a real, 100% Jackson owned-and-operated radio station. Some people like bland, corporate radio stations; our listeners happen to like local radio. But this huge conglomerate — they own hundreds of cookie-cutter-like radio stations around the country — tells all of its stations what to do, what to play, and what to say.
And they have told those stations that they MUST participate in this big scam that they call a contest. Every one of their stations is told to lie to their listeners, to pretend that each station is conducting a contest in which it gives away $5,000 a day.
But here’s the really dishonest part: Of all those stations, of all those tens of millions of listeners, only ONE listener each day wins. And guess how many winners their poor station here in Jackson has had since the beginning of this contest? Zero. None. Zip. Nada.
And I would do the same for the faked winner phone call: Just explain, truthfully, what the other station did.
In fact, I’d go one better. Details tomorrow….
