Here’s the email I got at 5 am this morning:
LIVE VIDEO: Hear Anna Nicole Smith Autopsy Results The results of Anna Nicole Smith’s autopsy will be released this morning during a news conference. Watch it here if you can’t be near your TV at 10:30 a.m. EDT/7:30 a.m. PDT. MORE DETAILS: <http://www.nbcsandiego.com/tu/5nCWZ69tH.html>
“Watch it here if you can’t be near your TV.”
Couldn’t that just as easily be “Tune in the X show at 7:30 or watch it here if you can’t be near your radio”? And then peg it with “Voice your opinions about the autopsy report on the air, right after the announcement.”
What do you think is more likely to spike listenership (especially in a PPM age):
A) Plugging a contest where one in a hundred listeners wants to invest her effort to win an unlikely prize, or…
B) Teasing a specific event at a specific time with demonstrated interest to the vast majority of your audience where their odds of “winning” (i.e., getting what they want) are 100 percent?
The email component to this is not an afterthought, it’s the engine that drivesthe whole effort.
Mine came from a TV station. How many did you get from a radio station?
I got none.