For our “Sportsmen Of the Air” package, we sell one year contracts for our sports coverage billed monthly. Our sportsmen receive commercials in all sporting events that we broadcast on KBOW AM550.
Our radio station was one of about three in our area that carried a college sports football and basketball broadcast season. The network had no market restrictions. To make matters worse, we are only a 1,000 Watt AM against three FM’s (one of which was 100,000 Watts). Here’s how we competed.
We took a :30 commercial position in each half and ran a sports trivia question. We had the trivia question voiced by our sports anchor from the morning drive shift and produced it with all the bells and whistles. Teaming up with a local TV and Appliance store, we threw out a trivia question each half of the game…of course where in the half varied from game to game. Listeners had the chance to call in and qualify for a home entertainment center featuring a big-screen TV.
We gave away the entertainment center at the end of the season with a big celebration at the TV store. We made the final cut of the qualifiers by setting up a game-show type setup in which our morning A/T was the host of the game show and asked the questions to our qualifiers. The winner took home the entertainment center and we included season tickets to the home games of the team for next season. The promotion was a huge success not only for our sponsors, but for the station’s loyalty factor with listeners and advertisers alike.
We had people straining to hear our AM signal just to hear the trivia question each broadcast!
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We implemented a fun way to sell Cardinals baseball games that is simple yet very effective.
If the Cardinals win, the sponsor pays, if they lose they don’t.
I limit it to 10 sponsors to put urgency on decisions.
We broadcast 156 games; for revenue purposes I figure a 50% win/lose ratio. ( You can use lower win ratio and change the rate per game to get to revenue number you are wanting to achieve for the season)
Using our schedule of 156 games and a 50% win season WLPO 1220 AM will bill approximately $7,000 on Cardinals Baseball this year. Not bad considering we used to give it away.
Clients really like this “gamble.” They like to the chance to beat us out of free advertising. My account execs have fun with it too. If the team is on a winning streak, They contact their clients to congratulate them on being a part of such a hot team. If the team is losing, they have fun with clients by saying something like, “I hope you are enjoying all these free ads your getting from me, I hope this doesn’t go on much longer, I need to eat, you know.”
Billing is done at the end of each week; Traffic is given a win/lose sheet for the week.
