Yesterday’s blog post about radio contests struck a responsive chord for many of you.
Whether a debate about call-in-to-win vs. text-to-win, memories of Jack McCoy’s ginormous “The Last Contest,” or the lost art of designing giveaways that could excite an entire market, I heard from many of you in our “comments” section, as well as on social media.
And I was also reminded contest strategy isn’t just about achieving higher ratings. Steve Chrypinski, Michigan Radio’s Marketing Director, took to Facebook to explain how his public radio station uses online giveaways to capture emails used “for station marketing and fundraising.”
And Mid-West Family’s Randy Hawke pointed directly to his favorite four-letter word – DATA. His company’s stations use “targeted rewarding of listeners with client certificates” to achieve better results, a better on-air sound, and “HAPPIER listeners.”
We’ve come a long way since just taking the 9th caller.
But whatever the motivation and the goal, execution always matters. That’s because when you put together a contest aimed at your total cume audience, it’s not always easy to control all the variables.
To that end, some of you recalled contests that failed for one reason or another. Dave Lange remembered an infamous scene from the legendary sitcom, WKRP in Cincinnati where a would-be complex contest puzzle designed to last weeks was solved in five minutes. As many of us have suspected, it had to be based on a real-life promotional debacle.
But sometimes, it works the other way. A contest that should come to a nice, clean conclusion ends up being left in an ambiguous mess of a dumpster fire.
That’s precisely what happened just a few weeks ago in Singapore when a station known as Gold 905 ran a multi-layered, major cash giveaway, “The Celebrity Name Drop.”
The simple idea was a montage of 14 celebrity voices, each 
reciting one word of the phrase that pays:
“Gold 9-0-5, the station that sounds good, and makes you feel good.”
OK, it doesn’t roll right off the tongue, but the contest has a familiar ring to it for many radio programmers.
To win the $10,000 grand prize, callers had to correctly name the entire group in order. (That’s about $7,000 in US dollars – a lot of money to put on the line.) Over time, listeners can figure out – through right and wrong guesses – all 14 celebs in the sequence.
As the BBC’s Owen Amos reported, Singapore underground railway driver, Muhammad Shalehan, thought he was the winner back on April 21 – more than a month after the contest was launched.
As Amos reported, Shalehan worked this puzzle hard, repeatedly trying to get through the phone lines (he actually made it multiple times), and trying to win the grand prize.
But when he recited his list of 14 names, Gold 905’s DJ Chris confirmed he only got 13 of them correct.
Apparently unsolved, Gold 905’s “Celebrity Name Drop” rolled on, as dedicated listeners continued to try to nail down the identifies of these elusive stars.
Then on May 6, the station announced it had a winner – Jerome Tan. And the contest was over.
Except it wasn’t. On Facebook, Gold 905 listeners noted Muhammad Shalehan gave the exact same answers as the announced winner – more than two weeks earlier.
The station’s parent company – a large conglomerate, Mediacorp – clarified that Shalehan’s guess didn’t adhere to their rules because he failed to pronounce the string of celebrity names accurately. The miscue? The very first name in the sequence – Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet.
And that’s when Muhammad went to the mountain – in this case, the real Tony Hadley. Thanks to the Internet, he was able to locate the artist’s management, explained his case, and then this video arrived in his email:
Hadley himself confirmed that while Muhammad Shalehan has a “slight accent,” he had, in fact, “pronounced my name absolutely correctly.”
Below are the pronunciations – featuring Hadley himself, followed by Shalehan, and then Tan.
Armed with his now indisputable evidence, Muhammed Shalehan went back to the station to plead his case again. After viewing Hadley’s video, Mediacorp still refused to offer him the promised $10,000 prize money. But now, they were inclined to make a “goodwill gesture” – a “token of appreciation” for his efforts and loyalty. According to the BBC, the reduced offer was $5,000 – half the original prize money paid to the eventual winner, Jerome Tan.
By then, the online community was having none of it, encouraging Shalehan to hold out for the entire cash prize. And as you might imagine, the radio station and its parent company took a great deal of online outrage in the process.
Finally late last month, Mediacorp walked back their judgement and their offer, awarding the full $10K to Muhammad Shalehan. As Online Citizen Asia put it, the company was facing a “massive backlash on social media,” and decided to just pay out the full amount.
So, a happy winner (eventually), a victorious audience and social community, a sympathetic rock star, and a sense by many that the “Contest Gods” finally made everything OK again.
That is, unless you’re Gold 905 and Mediacorp.
Their reputation was no doubt sullied by their own delays, their dithering, and their denials. And while you might argue they ended up garnering weeks of additional attention from “Celebrity Name Drop,” this is one of those times when there clearly IS such thing a bad publicity. And by the way, this also cost them a second prize payout of $10,000, which knowing the radio industry, was not in their Q2 budget.
For the rest of us, it’s another of those “what not to do” tales where many of us shake our heads and give our thanks this didn’t happen to one of our stations or clients.
But this snafu, kerfuffle, brouhaha was totally preventable. Stepping back from the story – now a part of Singapore radio legend – here are some of the lessons we can all learn from Gold 905’s (mostly) self-inflicted wound;
- The internet is more powerful than you even think. In another era, Muhammad Shalehan would not have been able to easily track down a popular artist, thousands of kilometers away in the UK. At best, it would have taken a long, laborious time. Thanks to technology, Tony Hadley was able to record a smartphone video and email it to Shalehan in short order.
- So is social media. Every step of the way, the online community sprung to Shalehan’s defense against a “corporate radio entity.” They encouraged him to stand fast against Gold 905’s decision, as well as not settling for a lesser amount of prize money. Pressure from social media played a major role in Mediacorp walking back its attempt to clean up the mess by offering a “token of their appreciation.”
- Don’t try to bigfoot a listener (or a station employee, for that matter). Mediacorp isn’t just a big company – they function as the national public broadcaster of Singapore, owning 11 radio stations, 6 TV stations, and video streaming platform, among other holdings. They are just the kind of media Goliath many would like to see humbled, especially by a little guy – yes, a David named Muhammad.
- A savvy legal counsel would have anticipated this. So, would a great PD. As discussed in yesterday’s post, incessantly asking the question “What could possibly go wrong?” is the best way to bulletproof contests and promotions where the human factor – and even bad luck – might come into play.
- Audiences – and communities – are becoming more diverse. – Not everyone looks or sounds like you. Whether in Singapore, Sioux City, or
Schenectady, listeners of varied backgrounds and ethnicities are tuning in – via a station’s terrestrial frequency – or more and more, a station’s stream. Mediacorp’s recent logo design, oddly enough, was described by the company as “a window to the world and a reflection of life.” Ouch. - Don’t try to paper over mistakes – When it was clear from the Hadley video and online pressure that Gold 905 had erred, the company tried the cheap way out with an offer they had to know would be criticized. But they tried it anyway. You know someone in the boardroom opined, “Let’s offer him half and see if that makes him go away.” So they did, but it didn’t.
- Celebrities giveth and taketh away – Brands simply cannot control what celebrities do, whether they end up behaving badly (as so many do at one point or another), or in this case, Tony Hadley coming to the rescue of the “little guy.” Whether it’s endorsements or in this case, using the names and reputations of big global stars to pimp your brand comes with potential downsides.
- At least come up with a stronger “phrase that pays” – OK, that’s me being a bit consultant-critical, but Gold 905 can and should do better. And it sure took them a long time to live up to it: “Gold 9-0-5, the station that sounds good, and makes you feel good.”
- Isn’t it ironic that Spandau Ballet’s big hit is titled “True?” Just sayin’.
Here, by the way, are the correct names and exact order of the celebrities in Gold 905’s “Celebrity Name Drop” contest:
Tony Hadley, Madonna, Maggie Wheeler, Ellen DeGeneres, Jim Carrey, George Clooney, David Bowie, Belinda Carlisle, Julie Andrews, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Meryl Streep, Michael Buble, and Rebecca Lim.
If you have trouble pronouncing “Buble,” I totally get it.
Thanks to JacoBLOG reader Peter Stewart for the heads-up on this story.
Jacobs Media has consistently walked the walk in the digital space, providing insights and guidance through its well-read national Techsurveys.
In 2008, jacapps was launched - a mobile apps company that has designed and built more than 1,300 apps for both the Apple and Android platforms. In 2013, the DASH Conference was created - a mashup of radio and automotive, designed to foster better understanding of the "connected car" and its impact.
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“If you’re the 100th caller and you answer our Impossible Trivia Question correctly you’ll qualify to win one of 100 keys that COULD start our Harley-Davidson … unless, of course, a DIFFERENT key winds up starting the Harley, or NONE of the keys start the Harley, and/or one of the keys breaks off in the ignition, or … “
You’ve done this before, right?
Maybe.
One of my favorite stories is from the 90s where a dj at a local station did a giveaway to the 99th caller. She forgot to turn off her mic, and listeners could hear her answering the phone, “, you’re caller 1,” followed by “caller 15,” “33”, “52,” etc.
Never a good thing, Kyle. Thanks for the comment.
Loved your contest articles. But here’s a story that proves the exception to the rule. In the late 70’s KSCS was a sleepy low-rated Fort Worth/Dallas country station with an easy listening format of long blocks of country music interrupted four times/hour for a commercial break. Joe Somerset consulted the Capital Cities owned station. To promote the idea that the low-rated station always played at least 3 songs in a row (this was revolutionary in those days) the Station Manager, Vern Orr, bought a few billboards that featured the words $10,000 and then in smaller letters something like “If you’re the first to catch us not playing 3-in-a-row.” At a meeting, announcers were told they would be fired if they didn’t play 3 in a row, except when scheduled. One Sunday morning announcer Joe Martin, by mistake. only played 2 in a row and the phones lit up. The station had no choice but to award the first caller $10,000. The next day Joe was fired. Later in the week the Dallas Morning News rans a story about the announcer who made the mistake and was fired by the station. The story was picked up by local TV and then went national. It was a dark, embarrassing time to work at KSCS/WBAP because where ever you went, people were talking about how the station cruelly fired the announcer. Top rated morning show host Ron Chapman even interviewed the fired announcer on KVIL. But then something unexpected happened. When the next book came out, little KSCS zoomed to the top of the ratings. For $10,000 and the cost of a few billboards KSCS’s “3-in-a-row” positioning statement caught fire. All because of the firing and follow-up bad publicity. Later on the hapless announcer was rehired on a part-time basis and the station continued to be the top Dallas station from 1980-1982, further propelled by the urban country fad. In the late 80’s the station repeated the same contest for $25,000 and but this time ran into a lawsuit over poor execution. You only get lucky once.
Maybe there IS such a thing as bad publicity. Thanks for sharing this great story. Only in radio, right?
In 1984, I was brought back to a station I had programmed in the late 1970s which had gone from A/C (I did that flip) to AOR (under new owners) to CHR (another ownership change). Initially, I was filling the utility slot while handling programming duties for our automated AM and production, but did two weekend afternoon shifts on the FM. Our GM instituted a similar promotion called the “51 minute music guarantee” in which that was the minimum amount of music per hour. If someone caught us breaking it, the prize was $10,000. Corporate did not want to do it, but agreed to it, PROVIDED we took steps to never give away the money.
Airstaff was instructed to scan the log every hour in case traffic scheduled too many commercial minutes and everyone was authorized to delete spots if the load was over 8:30. We put in the official rules that the winner would be the first person to deliver, in writing, the claim at the studios. We even had the chief engineer record a disclaimer to play at the end of any hour when we had an interruption in audio or signal that “due to technical difficulties the guarantee is not in effect for the preceding hour” (and yes, it was codified in the rules).
The rules also said that the contest ended at 12:01am December 31 unless we made an announcement on the air to the contrary. By that time, I was OM again for both stations, the GM had been replaced by Corporate over this and other bizarre ideas he had, and we collectively decided to quietly end the “contest”. I pulled all the promos and on-air references on Christmas Eve and although we still kept to the 51-minute minimum there was no mention of the $10,000.
New Year’s Eve came and I did a local countdown of the top songs of the year. When it got to be close to midnight, I stopped down for a minute or two and chatted with the overnight guy as we backtimed to the New Year.
And one of our listeners “caught” us (or so he thought) and shoved a written declaration under the front door sometime on January 1. I sent him a polite letter and a copy of the contest rules with the expiration highlighted, and thanked him profusely for listening so intently.
About a week later, he turned up at the station and the first thing he said to me upon being introduced was that he was sorry he hadn’t read the rules more carefully in the first place, how nice I had been to respond politely, and that he hoped he hadn’t wasted my time. He got a station tour and a ton of swag.
This was pre-Internet, but I bet all of his friends heard about it from him, and you can’t buy that kind of word-of-mouth. (The GM ended up in used car sales in a different market.)
Those music guarantees will kill you every time. It’s hard to enough to live up to promising to play X songs in a row. Achieving a minutes of music guarantee is especially precarious, especially given the stress levels and time pressures of being on the air to begin with. Having “bulletproof” rules is essential, of course, but as Gold 905 learned, you better make they’re airtight. Thanks for that story, KM.
Once we were giving away $9500 to the first person to decipher our 9 digit serial number. Once the contest was over (and it did run well) we found there was a lawsuit because the winner had apparently agreed to share the winnings with other co-workers and then decided to keep it all herself. There was the key promotion where 40 people cycled through the car-and none of the keys worked. (It was a defective ignition switch.) The car giveaway where the winner was blind (and didn’t have a license) so management decided we had to award another car. We did “the prize catalog” and offered up a prize from “the bonus line” to give the promotion a needee shot. We didn’t expect a winner, didn’t really want a winner at that point -but we had a winner. I don’t know how many stations ever awarded a $44,000 airplane (in 1985) but we did. It was Murphy’s law and we didn’t have lawyers involved so deeply. Yet. We got a bunch of added positive press on that one. The one fall promotion we did that was built on “forced listening” – but our competition was touting a $1,000,000 prize. In the end of that book we had a 10.3, the competitor had a 4 share. Radio contesting has always been fun to put together and fun to execute although it could give a PD (or GM) severe coronary issues. It’s well worth it. but in 2020 you have to have a great team of lawyers behind you and a lot of discussion among your team to make it all work. Guess what? Mistakes will happen so you better be aware. Thanks for the discussion, Fred.
I recall reading about a radio station that had a contest giving away a car. When the winner showed up to claim her Prize – a Toyota, the station gave her a toy Yoda. She complained it was a bait and switch and cried foul. The station said she misheard what the prize was. She took them to court and she won the law suit and a Toyota.
WOW!! It would be interesting to hear promos for the contest–to see if it was obvious that it was a toy Yoda, or if they were really misleading people. (The old legal standard of “how would a typical person understand it?”)
That was most definitely NOT an ABC Radio station. Thanks, Gordon.
Wow, great blogs, both yesterday’s and today’s. And for me, great memories. Though I didn’t know the term at the time, I was what I later learned was a “prize pig,” winning prizes ranging from more records (including the entire Beatles library–THANK you, Bobby Rich at B-100!) and concert tickets than I could ever hope to count, to tons of money and even a motorcycle. Even came kind of close to winning a house!
Two observations, the first from yesterday, the idea that “to win prizes” ranks at the bottom of the list of why people listen to the radio. I would point out that that 14 percent who listed that is still a healthy number of people you’d love to have listening. But I want to especially take exception to the wording, “To WIN prizes.” You can enjoy listening to great, fun, interesting contests (like the good if not-so-well-executed “Gold 9-0-5” contest) without necessarily listening TO win a prize yourself. Very few people TRY OUT (comparatively) for Jeopardy, The Prices is Right, Wheel and Millionaire, but millions upon millions WATCH these programs. That is, they’re not watching TO win prizes, but because they enjoy the games and contests and watching others win. (Well, except for instances where you DIS-like someone and start watching in hopes of watching them LOSE–but even then, they’re still eyeballs!) In the same way, for most formats, people will always enjoy a good, well-executed contest. I would like to know what percentage listens “to” win contests, what percentage listen “because” they enjoy contests, and what percentage tune OUT because of contests. Ok, off my high Z-104 motorcycle there.
Second observation is, like everything else in life, things change and lawyers get involved, and what was once, simple fun just becomes to complicated and all the joy is stripped away. As I said, I used to win TONS of records…and they would show up in the mail every few days (station sticker in one corner and the obligatory punched-hole–presumably marking it as promotional so you couldn’t sell it(?) in another). It was always such a treat to get a new record from the radio station. Forward so many years later when, as an adult I heard a radio station giving away some CD I liked and so I called in and won it. Instead of the fun and excitement of–completely hassle-free–getting a new record in the mail a couple days later from the mailman, I had to go down to the station and seemingly sign my life away in legal forms to get the CD. Definitely NOT worth the time or trouble, and it was the last CD I ever won. (Sorry, Gogo’s ,but it just wasn’t worth the trouble.)
In short, done right, contests can draw lots of listeners–even those not listening TO win a prize–but, like everything else we do, it has to be done with the LISTENER in mind. Make it a great, fun, listener experience, and listeners and their ears will be there for you. If not, they may turn off the radio entirely and go watch Jeopardy.
I think your last paragraph is the one that resonates with me, Dave.
You may indeed be right about the wording of “to win prizes.” But I’ve seen contests tested by many, many different research companies over the years. In general, contests and giveaway don’t do very well – consistent with what he see.
That said, when a station happens across (or creates) a fun contest, all bets are off. Back in the day, “The Birthday Game” has some of those elements. It was suspenseful, you believed you could win, it was well produced, and everyone loves celebrating their birthday. These days, few contests capture that vibe.
Thanks, as always, for always providing great and thoughtful comments, Dave.
One more thought, Fred, when you ended the first blog saying the next day’s blog would be about a “radio contest gone very wrong”–and before I got to the end of the sentence, which said it was “far away from us in the U.S.”–I IMMEDIATELY thought you were going to dive into perhaps the most infamous of radio contests ever IN the U.S.–the sad and tragic, “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest in Sacramento. What a reminder of just how badly a contest can go–and how you can never be too careful in its design and execution.
The Sacramento “contest” (more a morning show promotion) was a true tragedy. Yes, I was looking for a situation like Gold 905’s that also provided lessons about diverse audience. And yes, Singapore is FAR away. Thanks, Dave.
I ran into a similar situation with a contest at Magic 106.7 in Boston. It was the station’s 20th anniversary. We were the longest-running format in the market (if you don’t count Kiss 108 because they were originally disco, and WAAF because they were in Worcester for the first 25 years).
The contest was fun. I had edited together 20 songs with the word Magic in the lyrics. Very tight montage, just the word Magic. Lots of big name artists have sung Magic in songs. The deal was if you identified the first one by artist and title correctly you got $100. Get #2 and it’s another $100. You keep going until you get one wrong. If you got all 20 correctly, you win Twenty Thousand Dollars!! We took callers 4 times a day: 9,11,1,3…hitting every daypart.
I was hoping to wrap it up on the Thursday after Thanksgiving…the final day of the Fall Book. All was going smoothly until we hit song #19. I had used the Eagles “Please Come Home for Christmas” because of the line Henley sings, “but it’s Christmas…Christmas Magic.” I’d actually been saving the idea for years and knew I could only run the contest in the fall if I wanted to include the Eagles song.
The contest was running over by about a week – no big deal – but nobody was getting #19. Meanwhile, I was down in Dallas getting some new jingles done and I got a call from my long-time Music Director, Mark Laurence. Some listener had Googled “magic in song lyrics” and nothing by the Eagles came up. Then she Googled “Eagles songs that say magic” and again, nothing.
Meanwhile, being the Christmas season, we had to play numerous versions of every popular Christmas song because there are only about 22 that people really want to hear. Mark listened to the Aaron Neville version of “Please Come Home for Christmas” and he is clearly singing, “but it’s Christmas, Christmas MY DEAR.” That’s why no one has gotten it right. Henley doesn’t sing Christmas Magic. I never even checked it because I was certain he sang magic. Just like I never checked to see if Nat King Cole is singing “chestnuts.” Of course he was.
So I get on the phone with our corporate lawyer and explain the situation. “How many listeners who would have won did not win?” No one. Nobody guessed it.
“How many people said you have the wrong lyric?” No one.
So we kept going, and the next day a listener correctly identified the title and artist (no mention of what Henley’s supposedly really singing) and then went on to correctly identify song #20. Congrats, you’ve won $20,000!
All ended well, no repercussions. But even today, when I hear that song, it still sounds to me like Henley is singing Christmas Magic.
And “there’s a bathroom on the right.”
Don, great story – told splendidly. Thanks for this contest horror story, from one of the most buttoned-up, thorough programmers out there. Appreciate you sharing it.
Wow, fantastic story, Don! Had me on the edge of my seat just READING it! If you check out my comment above, you’ll see why I find the contest you came up with EXACTLY like those I have always listened to and loved! Glad it worked out! You had me scared for a moment! And now, off to youtube an Eagles Christmas song…