Mark Ramsey Media LLC - sync radio and digital media

Which reminds me of what Derek Sivers from CDBaby found out about Snocap & MySpace…
“…Now they still wanted our entire digital distribution catalog, but it was to create Flash widget stores on MySpace, which sounded like a great idea, so we said OK….
…Then the sales reports came in. $12,000 total sales for the 8 months they’d been active.”
http://cdbaby.org/stories/07/10/19/0126457.html

True, but it takes practically no thought, effort, or creativity to do a contest like this one. Who–in the entire cluster or satellite facility–could devote time or brainpower or production effort to executing a more creative, compelling contest? This was much simpler, gave the ILLUSION (to the station and listeners) that you had lots of listeners, and got you back to “another commercial free block of the best of the 70s, 80s, 90s and today” more quickly.
Besides, who wants to engage listeners? That’s really a lot of trouble and we’re short-staffed already. We’ll just lower our rates and increase commercial units to up revenue.
Don (Is my sarcasm showing?) Keith

Thanks for bringing this deep dark secret into the light, Mark.
When Tommy Edwards and I were working together at KCBS-FM/LA (prior to Arrow), we did these contests for cash giveaways ($1000) and had the ability to get a computer report after each contest that would provide all sorts of cool info. How many calls came in from which area codes, which numbers, how many duplicate calls, etc.
The data then was the same as you report now which promptly moved us to drop these kind of contests all together and use the money in a more productive manner.
Not sure why our industry hadn’t figured this out before.

Yes, 200 participants aren’t too many. The problem is, some of those 200 who are motivated by a station promotion are also excited and willing to fill out a diary and send it back to Arbitron on time. Like you, when I was younger I thought these contests were a waste of time. Then the LARGE market PD I was working for pointed out the connection between contest pigs and diarykeepers. Since we were number one, I couldn’t really disagree with him.

Well if you are seriously and without any tongue in cheek arguing that doing something for the entire audience which appeals to a mere 200 people even in a top 5 market is going to influence your ratings in any favorable direction, then you should go back to the beginning of this blog and read from post one on.
For the record, there is NO connection between “contest pigs” and diarykeepers. The connection is between fans of radio, fans of your station, survey takers and diarykeepers.
It’s time to kill these dumb myths.
If you want a connection between “contest pigs” and diarykeepers Arbitron would have to announce a sweepstakes for your market so a mere 200 people could take part.

To put this on perspective, KSBJ in Houston had their web site taken down by Network Solutions because of more than a million hits, after KSBJ promoted a listener phone call that was posted on their web site.
All from a phone call that touched and engaged the listeners emotionally.
Let’s see, 200 vs. 1,000,000…

I won’t argue that there’s only a small number of people who call stations for contests, but sometimes issues like the one described here are caused by odd things that happen when a massively large number of phone calls all go to one number. My own station had an issue several years ago where only calls from one tiny rural exchange about 40 miles from us were getting through during our contests, while calls from every other community in our market couldn’t get through at all during contests but got through just fine when the lines weren’t burning up. As a result, the number of calls we “got” was reduced greatly until the problem was fixed.

Considering my data came from the phone company itself, I doubt that we can chalk these numbers up to snafu instead of common reality.

Here’s the challenge. If there are only 200 people calling in for free tickets, how many listeners actually respond to on-air advertising?
This gets to the heart of the entire business model.
I know in public radio, during those huge beg-a-thons they do, the numbers are terrible. At one major market NPR station, where the ratings are wonderful, the membership is less than 5% of the actual listeners. This is NPR, which is considered to be quality radio, not dumbed down.
On the commercial side, when you hear those 1-800 ads on stations, they have different numbers for particular stations, so the advertiser can match the results with the ad buy. And they know if an ad is getting them results.

call a radio station? How quaint…first off the kind of person who would “call” a radio station are not the type of people listening to a radio station. Calling to enter a contest is so 1980′s. Today people text in where they never get a busy signal and everybody gets a personla response. But I guess all that kinda breaks down when you have to have people actually “call” to enter. I just dont get it.

The key to your story is that they analysed the data.
That more than anything else will keep radio in (or out) of the game going forward.
It’s not the mistakes we make that are the problem – it’s what we learn from them.

What about ‘lurkers’? I spend many hours viewing posts on forums with little or no interaction on my part.
I listen to a lunchtime phone in programme avidly, yet have never even considered participating.
Phone-in competitions, as long as they are designed with the listner in mind as well as the competitor, can make perfectly engaging radio.
The actual response to an on-air competition is by no means a measure of its entertainment value.

If you’re not getting response on the phone, you’re not getting response out there in the audience.