As Radio X in the UK starts their new promotion "20 Seconds to 20K"...it reminded me of a chat I had with John Taylor, when he was PD at 98FM in Dublin.
(John had turned the station's fortunes around after arriving from New Zealand. He later went on to programme 4FM).
We were talking about contests and the type of person that takes part.
Major promotions, such as 'The Fugitive', 'Beat The Bomb' or (in this case) '20 Seconds to 20K' are nice and flash...they attract attention and grab headlines. Stick a well-conceived logo on there and you have a lovely looking social media post.
But does the listener want to play?
In other words...do they feel they can win?
John's point was - The bigger the prize, the less likely it feels that you can win it.
Makes sense. Which is easier in your mind to earn - £100 or £100,000? The mind looks at '100' and thinks 'possible'. 100,000...? Difficult.
I'm not suggesting doing away with big prizes. They're great for ratings. No one will argue with that.
What I am saying is...never under-estimate the power of a free pizza voucher, cinema tickets or any prize of low value. To us, they are not as 'sexy' as the big prize. To your listener, they are attainable.
So true I remember one Saturday the Indo had published a pull out on U2 and we had about 10 copies of the paper in studio. I said I'd post them out to anyone who wanted a copy in case they couldn't get to the shops.The text machine blew up!!
ReplyDelete