Thursday, March 6, 2008

Favorite, Fun, Out-of-the Box Idea

We see a lot of spots on this site and others - so lets delve into another important area a bit more: outside media or at least not-for-air ideas.

Does anyone have any cool or fun or interesting ideas on non-traditional ways of promoting their station?

Here's one of my favs. When I worked in Houston, the station was in the shadows of downtown. So every once in awhile I would go to the mall downtown and eat at the food court(I love you Chic-fi-la)...

I started looking around and noticed tons of downtown workers(no non-locals - pretty hard to find in a mall!), most adult 25-54 and on every table was one of those signs that promoted something in the mall.

My idea was to place a sweeps promo piece in there every day.

I can hear you all saying: "Wow, idopromoz... what a great idea. Not."

Well, that's not the best part. We called the mall who had really no idea what to do with someone who actually wanted to advertise in their mall.

So for the grand total of $75 or so - we bought gift certificates for them to give away(on our station's behalf!) to people in the mall... we also got our ads on everyt table in the foodcourt, everyday for an entire month. They even had their people fill the plastic sign holders for us!

It was fun to goto the mall and watch if people were paying attention to the ads. I overheard a couple of conversations and noticed people actually reading them.

What outside media campaign can reach adult, working people who live in your market, who love shitty fast food --- every day of sweeps for $75?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Seriously a great idea. While I am not in television, but radio I wanted to do the exact same thing a few years ago. Our station was already on-site at the local mall every month and the ads on the tables in the food court already promoted an event that we presented every month. The downside, it was without mention of our station and obviously did not have our logo. To me, a shame because I would like to think every impression helps build a brand. Nobody wanted to hear me...oh well. Glad to see it worked for you!