While the Christmas season is a great time of the year for a multitude of reasons, December is historically a tough month for Rock stations due in part to the impact of stations going all-Christmas all the time. Christmas is also the time when advertisers spend big dollars and are looking for ideas to cut through the clutter.
Virtually every one of these promotion ideas provides room for sponsorship, a retail tie-in, or other form of support. Consider sitting down with your sales manager now to review this section so you can turn this into a great promotional season that generates revenue. Or if you’d like, Paul is available to speak with them to brainstorm ideas.
The 12 Days of Christmas
You can either come up with twelve great prizes to give away one each day or build a pyramid of gifts. Day One give away a CD player, Day Two give away a CD player and a DVD, on the third day a CD Player, DVD, iPod, etc. This is similar to a “Fantasy Garage” or even “Get A Life.” You could also use this in conjunction with our Eliminator promotion.
Here are some other “Twelve Days” angles to consider:
12 Days of Christmas Cash: Give away cash for twelve consecutive days in December. Use the “song-of-the-day” or a sounder to signal the chance to win. Give away a prize every hour or a larger prize once a day. Use your email database to give inside information for bonus prizes or specific times the songs will play. And don’t forget to suggest the “50:50” Charity donation.- The 12 Days of Axe-Mas: Get 12 signed guitars from your core artists and give away one guitar a day. You could play a double shot or a three-fer from the artist that signed the guitar and then have people identify the songs or you could use a sounder or a song of the day. Signed guitars are readily available on auction sites, like eBay.
- The 12 Digital Days of Christmas: Award digital and high tech items to your listeners for twelve days up until Christmas. Include digital watches, cameras, DVD players, iPhones, a laptop computer, digital cable or satellite packages, and flat-screen TVs. Award one prize each day or build up the prize pack daily.
- The Gift of WXXX: Give away hour-long air shifts at the station, another twist on consumer generated media. None of your jocks really want to work during the holiday, so fill in with listeners (you will need staff to oversee them or pre-tape them). Allow the winner to select music, features and bring friends on the air with him/her.
- A Very Hairy Christmas: Feature ‘80s Hair Bands all Christmas weekend long.
- Cheap Sprees: We’ve all heard of major $5,000 shopping sprees where a lucky winner might have thirty minutes to run through a store to grab whatever they can, but let’s face it, that’s a lot of money. With tongue in cheek, work with a local Dollar Store and give away 30 SECOND Shopping Sprees at that Dollar Store.
- Christmas Chaos: Take snippets from five (5) to ten (10) Holiday/Christmas songs and edit them together. Play the produced piece at specific times throughout the day and have listeners call-in and guess the title and artist from each song to win a shopping spree at a local mall or department store (or other prize).
- Box Full of Rock: Make a special weekend out of it and give away “boxes full of rock.” Use a sounder to get people to call in and when they do, they spin the Wheel of Rock. They either win a box full of CDs, iPods, mp3 players, etc. or they win a box full of rocks. A grand prize could be the ultimate rock, a diamond. This can sound good on the air, but make sure you have a “consolation prize” for the winners of just rocks.
- Christmas Karaoke: Have someone sing (or play) the line of a Christmas carol. The first listener who calls in and correctly sings the next line wins a Christmas tree and/or another holiday prize.
- Naughty or Nice: Use a jingle bells sounder to signal people to call in and see if Santa thought they were naughty or nice this year. Make sure you have a pre-recorded voice of Santa saying both naughty and nice. When you get the winner on the phone, if the voice says naughty, they get a lump of coal. If they were nice, set them up with a cool prize. Gift Certificates, concert tickets, Christmas trees, etc.
- Fruitcakes from Hell: For starters, a call you or your morning show should make is to the Claxton Fruitcake Company in Claxton, Georgia (912-739-3441). Be prepared to talk to some pretty serious people about this interesting food, and then take calls from listeners discussing their favorite fruitcake stories or what they like to do with them (besides eating them).
- Holiday Lights: A lot of communities are building giant holiday light displays in parks so people can drive through and view the lights from the warmth of their cars. Team up with your community if they have done this, or try to get usage of a park to set up your own display. A charitable donation of some kind per car gets you in and have Santa at the end of the line for the kids. You could also sell Christmas trees, refreshments, and station merchandise at the stop. Many local zoos also have light displays. You could work with them and a charity.
- Christmas Lights: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly: Christmas lights are a huge part of the holiday season…so much so that many local newscasters/weather guys incorporate a Christmas Lights Watch.
- Show Us Your…: Organize offices and homes to display your call letters in Christmas lights. Give away a grand prize for the best display. A similar contest with snow or ice sculptures is also good if your climate is conducive to that sort of thing. You can also create your own light display on a building, bridge, etc. Free advertising is a wonderful thing. You could also sponsor a home decorating contest, where listeners can decorate their houses for prizes. Award prizes in several categories, including Most Beautiful, Best One-Color Display, Wackiest, Tackiest, etc.
- Tacky Christmas Lights: Have listeners turn in their neighbors’ tacky Christmas lights via by posting photos on your web site. Conversely, you could have listeners post photos of the coolest Christmas light displays around town.
- Shake the Tree or “Santa’s Sack”: Several times a day, rattle Santa’s toy sack and see what drops out. Include concert tickets, CDs, movie passes, and cash. A simple, inexpensive promotion that could be done frequently. Add an element of tension to the prize by saying that some presents are wrapped, meaning listeners have to choose a cash prize or open the box a la “Let’s Make A Deal.”
- July in Christmas: We’ve all heard of Christmas in July promotions. but if you live in a cold weather market like many of us, consider turning that on its head and hold a July in Christmas promotion. Hold it at a local indoor pool, bring in some fake palm trees, get a big pile of sand, crank out the tunes, and have a good time. Or, instead of throwing a pool party, give away prizes that are purely summertime-oriented flip flops, sunglasses, tanning lotion, etc.
- Lingerie and/or Jewelry Seminar: Work with either a local Lingerie store or a Jewelry store to put on a few seminars for guys who are absolutely clueless about how to buy such things. It’s a good way to grab a sponsorship while providing a major public service to the guys in your audience who simply don’t have a clue.
- Jingle Bell Rock: This has been done this with great success. Paint a logo on a rock, then hide it somewhere in your listening area. Three times a day give out a clue as to where the rock is. You can even use your website to give out some clues. The first listener to successfully bring the rock into the station gets the prize package. The package should be pretty significant, including items such as a home entertainment system, computer package, tickets to concerts, CDs, station merchandise, and more. Make this hunt a challenge! You don’t want a listener finding the rock the first day of the contest.
- Get Hold of Santa: There are hundreds of people around the world who have legally changed their names to “Santa Claus.” A quick search of the Internet (or your local phone book) can get you their phone numbers. If they are cooperative, your morning show can have a lot of fun with this. For example, check out the Santa Claus of Salt Lake City, UT at (801) 263-2905.
- Talk to Santa: WROR in Boston did this and it sounded great. Promote that Santa will be in studio on a specific day at 6PM to talk to kids from the North Pole. Lots of theatre of the mind stuff here — parents call in, text-in to have a chance for Santa to talk with your child. This can create good chatter in the market.
- Shopping Mall Shuttle: See if you can work with a major mall in your area to help shuttle people from the outer reaches of the mall parking lot. You can easily come up with a few golf carts (emblazoned with the station logo, manned by station personnel if not your morning show), and for a small fee that would be donated to charity, you can help people get through the lots and onto what they are really there for, spending money on gifts for loved ones.
- Christmas Wish: Always a big winner because it works. Listeners send in their Christmas wishes and you grant as many as possible. These can run the gamut from tickets to a sold-out concert to a meal for a family with nowhere to go. Have the jocks make phone calls to the people whose wish you are fulfilling. This sounds great on the air. Warning: While sponsor and listener support are strong, this promotion costs money. Why do you keep hearing stations doing this every year? When it’s done right, it can be huge.
- Mall Massage: Provide free neck and shoulder massages for busy shoppers. If your station has an attractive jock(s) or a Rock Girl, they can provide massages as well. Otherwise, hire a portable massage company (like the kind you see in the airport) and cut a deal to donate proceeds to a local charity.
- Drive Through Caroling: Here’s one for your morning show. Get a listener on the phone and have them go to a fast food drive-through. Once there, they have to sing the first part of a Christmas carol to the attendant. They can’t say anything else, just sing the first part of the carol. If the attendant sings back, they win a prize. (Make sure you have one for the attendant, too.) It makes for some great audio on the air.
- Fantasy New York Christmas: Send a listener to do their Christmas shopping in New York on Fifth Avenue. Include a trip to the Radio City Music Hall for their Radio City Christmas Spectacular. This can be sold to advertisers as a sponsorship package. For information on other New York City Christmas events, go to the NYC Tourist site. Another alternative is to send them shopping in a well-known shopping district closer to your market (Chicago, Palm Beach, Los Angeles).
- Re-Gifting: Once people get back from the holiday, have them call in to see who got the worst gift for Christmas. Try to trade them equally stupid things for their gifts. You could also reward the worst gift a really cool prize, concert tickets, or a meet ‘n’ greet opportunity.
- Breast Christmas Ever: Women enter the contest which gives them free breast implants. As always, run this by your attorneys before doing anything. This is something that should definitely generate some buzz in your town.
- Holiday Recovery: Stressed out from the holidays? Too broke from all of the gift-giving and party preparation? Then give your listeners an escape from everyday life. Label it a “Recovery Weekend” and give away spa and health club gift certificates, antacid tablets, and those “soothing sounds” CDs as qualifying gifts (check with legal first before giving away meds).
- AM Show eCard: Have your morning show send out an online card to your database with a link for a free music download and possibly “Best of” audio from the show. This would also be a great opportunity for online coupons.
- Musical Christmas Wishes: Give the listeners their Christmas wish in the form of requests. To truly fulfill their wishes, tie-in with a local record store to give them the compact disc their song is from. Be sure to plan your music log accordingly and clarify with your air personalities what is acceptable and not.
Christmas Tree Ideas
Tree Pee: Another twist on the Christmas Tree giveaway is to get a tree lot to donate X amount of trees (your frequency works well) and make an event out of it. The first X amount of people that show up (and they will show up) will get the chance to walk their dog (or animals, that’s up to you) through the tree lot. If the dog “marks” the tree, they win it. Be sure to alert the media, you can get some really good TV and press coverage out of this.- Station Tree Lot: Sponsor a tree lot and use the proceeds to benefit a local charity. Be sure to have a personality out every night and register listeners who purchase trees for a marquee prize. You could sponsor one lot all season or travel to different lots every night.
- Giving Tree: Have a tree in the center court of a local mall. Put names of needy kids and families in your area and what they would like for Christmas on the tree in the form of ornaments. Shoppers can come by, pick an ornament off the tree, buy a gift and then place it back under the tree. Deliver the presents on Christmas Eve.
- Virtual Tree: You can also make a virtual tree on your website. Post the same information, but have site visitors select an organization or individual to sponsor and provide gifts for.
- I’m Too Lazy to Shop for a Tree: You can actually buy a Christmas tree online. How reputable the firms are is hard to say, but the prices seem reasonable (between $45-$70 on average) and all of these guys were in business last year as well. This could make for a neat prize on-air or off. Here is one place to check out: Omni Farm
Christmas: The Workforce
A great idea is to throw a Workforce holiday party. Invite Workforce members to a local restaurant or bar for the holiday party, complete with free holiday food, drink specials, and a nice little gift from the station. Or you could pull select offices from your workforce applicants and throw them an exclusive holiday party, with catered food, prizes, and an appearance by some of the airstaff. Make the party location and time available exclusively to your Workforce database via email. And drive listeners to register so they can get the skinny on the free food and party.
Scroogiest Bosses Party: Office Christmas parties are no longer a given by any stretch, and clearly we’re in an era where cutbacks are happening in every area possible. Spend time taking calls or submissions from offices that have tales to tell about how cheap their boss or company is (such as charging employees for coffee, or downgrading the toilet paper). Of course this has to remain anonymous in most cases, but take the best ones you get and invite them to a party at a local club/bar and given them the Office Party they deserve.
Football
To many people Christmas means one thing, a day off to watch sports ALL DAY! Look into the various sporting events around the country that take place Christmas Day [Aloha Bowl, (maybe) NBA, college basketball, etc.] or give away satellite dishes with a full NFL/NCAA package (you could make the program package for the following year). Be sure to check out the Football Memo for more sports-related promotions.
Charity Events
Here are some ideas to help kick start your giving spirit:
Charity for the Holidays: The holiday season lends itself to charitable and community activities. While contests and promotions are important and should be a major part of your game plan, don’t lose sight of charitable angles as you move forward with your planning. Many markets have had HUGE success with toy drives. A Texas station does a “Christmas M*A*S*H* unit” each season. They have tents and portable equipment with their call letters stenciled all over (like W*X*Y*Z*) their signage. They move from location to location throughout December collecting toys and then donating them all to charity.- Stuff-A-Bus: This is a great idea to help generate buzz for your station all while helping different children’s charities. Over a weekend, have one or more buses at different locations throughout your city to be used as a toy drop-off. Work in conjunction with a local TV station to fill the buses with toys for kids during the holiday. Assign a different airstaff member to each bus and keep percentage totals of how full each bus is with toys. Interview people that are dropping off toys and use it for imaging or put them live on air. You could also have each bus sponsored by a different advertiser and could not only generate some revenue, but also some competition between these businesses to see who can come up with the highest number of toys.
- Cars for Christmas: KKCD/Omaha has done this for a few years where they take used cars as donations from listeners and in turn, they have people write in why they need a car. A promotion that works for everyone.
- Coats for Kids: Set-up a coat drop-off at a sponsor’s location for families that might not be able to afford coats for their children. You can also work with The Salvation Army. Check out their website.
- Community Action: Broadcast live from a few soup kitchens and invite listeners to come down and help. You may also consider setting up a volunteer hotline that informs your listeners about organizations that need assistance. Several stations have had success with such charity actions as building a house with Habitat For Humanity and donating it to a needy family, teaming up with the Marine Corps “Toys For Tots” program and charging one toy as admission to a station holiday concert, or buying hats and gloves to distribute to homeless people. You can also hold a “Pay for Play” auction for a local charity. The station will play any song the listener wants for cash donations that will be given to charity. Be careful not to stray too far from your format too often when playing back the requests.
- The Christmas Present HOT list: This is a great way to utilize text messaging. Have listeners text what they really want for Christmas. Tally the ten most requested items and then give those prizes in December. Your listeners take complete control of what THEY want for Christmas from their favorite station. This is an opportunity to form a texting partnership with a phone company where you share in the texting fees, or simply selling sponsorship of the promotion to one of the phone providers.
- Adopt-A-Child: Read the first name of a needy child and a gift they would want on the air and urge a listener to “adopt” the child – buy the gift, wrap it and drop it off at the station. You can have your morning show or other staffers hand-deliver the gifts and good cheer at a party for the kids. You should list the kids and the gifts on your site and have people sign-up there as well.
- Christmas Online Auction: Christmas is a great time to sell some of those autographed items you’ve been collecting all year. Put them up for sale on your website in an auction format. Use the money to buy toys or items for kids in need.
- Home for the Holidays: Fly listeners to their families or fly family members in for the holidays.
- American Made Toys: Here are some links for anyone that wants to buy American Made only toys.
- The Power of Christmas: What’s missing from most every toy? Batteries! And what’s worse than seeing your kids open up presents but you’ve forgotten the batteries and don’t have any lying around? Buy up as many batteries as you can or work with any number of advertisers for discounted batteries to help successfully power up the holiday season. There are a number of things you can do on your site to make sure it fully reflects the holiday spirit. If you’re going to do this, we suggest starting “Christmas on The Web” a week or so after Turkey Day. The main thing to keep in mind is that most of the ideas mentioned in this memo (for all of the holidays) have an Internet application to go along with whatever you do on-air, with a charity, a contest, or for you morning show – always be thinking “What’s The Digital Application.” Here are some features you may want to consider adding to your site for the Holiday Season:
- Yule Tube: Make your site a destination for Christmas music by providing format-relevant music videos on your site. Plumb them in using videos found on YouTube and in minutes (and for free) you can have a huge assortment of Christmas music/videos on your site – and a great way to have some ownership of Christmas music without impacting your terrestrial broadcast.
- Online Shopping or Christmas Coupons: This could be not only a revenue generator, but a solid service to drive traffic to your site. Be sure the retailers are targeted to your audience and don’t just toss up a hodge-podge of online retail locations. Also look for affiliate programs where you get a percentage of the money spent by the traffic you deliver.
- Downloads: Provide custom WXXX Christmas screensavers, fonts, clip art and wallpaper. You might even find some Christmas related games for kids and adults to post as well. The above information should serve as a guide to let you know what people are looking for on the web — and allow you to custom tailor your site for the holiday season by creating links and content areas dedicated to the above items — it could even generate some revenue!
- Elf Yourself: It would be great to build this feature out for your site, but you can always direct your listeners to the original “Elf Yourself” site. By all means, be sure to “Elf” (or “Scrooge”) your airstaff and post the videos to your site – a great way to generate some traffic and enjoy the holiday spirit.
Links to Christmas Websites
Christmas has found a home on the Internet. It is undeniably the biggest holiday of the year, and as such there is plenty of material. Again, as you use search engines to scour the Web, you will encounter more educational, religious and historical information than you could imagine. There are a number of very creative and useful sites for generating promotional and on-air ideas.
- Northpole: A great little site, while kid-focused, there’s plenty to do, and probably a dozen ideas you can rip-off and turn into on-air activities.
- Christmas is a site that claims to be “Santa’s domain on the web.” It’s loaded with Christmas ideas, shopping links, Christmas traditions around the world, you can learn to say “Merry Christmas” in 33 different languages and even find out how many days, hours, minutes and seconds EXACTLY until Christmas! You can even e-mail Santa.
- Santa’s Village is “The Merriest Place in Cyberspace” is a top-notch all-inclusive site. Plenty of interesting things to see and do here. Check out the Santa Tracker! Tons of Christmas related information and links.
- Merry Christmas is another full-service Christmas web site featuring music, history, traditions, and more. Be sure to check out the Kids Zone.
- Christmas Gifts is one of the more commercial web sites, it features some handy links as well as lots of shopping links and some neat gift ideas.
- Everything Christmas is a great site for general links. Whether you want to shop online, get lyrics for Christmas songs, find dinner recipes, or just get basic information on the holiday, this is the place.
Christmas Games
Reindeer RoundupBe sure to update your site immediately AFTER the holidays, so someone browsing your web site in January doesn’t find links to Santa’s home page or ornament ideas!
Christmas Movies
Here is a list of the 100 Best Christmas Movies of All Time. These would be great for seasonal drops to spice up the production or to use as contest sounders. Additionally, you can use them for trivia contests like “name that movie.”