The Infinite Dial

I was listening to some Seattle radio recently and came across two of my long-time favorite promotions, both of them dating back to when I was still in college and following the business through the trades and airchecking.

The first was "Thanksgiving On The Mayflower," which I first encountered on WBZZ (B94) Pittsburgh in the early '80s, and which became a staple attention-getter for many years. In its original incarnation, it usually consisted of giving a local family a Thanksgiving diner on a Mayflower moving van. The new one on KBKS (Kiss 106.1) has morphed into a variant on "Stuff a Bus," with members of the morning team camping out until listeners fill up the moving van with food donations. WOLX Madison, Wis., and the Cumulus/Montgomery, Ala., stations are also doing similar versions of the promotion, with no apparent catering involved.

The other old favorite was hearing KCMS (Spirit 105.3) Seattle's "Family Name Game," which has made its way through a number of Christian ACs lately. I first encountered it as "Family Fortune" on Mike Joseph's Hot Hits WCAU-FM Philadelphia around the time of their sign-on in fall '81. The WCAU version was to give the surname that was going to get a cash call later in the hour. The KCMS version is a call-in and uses first names--announced in advance on the Website. Listeners are eligible if anybody in their family has that first name. (KCMS, by the way, sounded great, and it was clear why they had become a major ratings success story for Christian AC.)

I'm always happy to see promotions directors and program directors come up with great new promotions, of course, but it was good to hear these two again. "Name Game," which was sort of a forerunner to the monstrously effective "Birthday Game," has always been a favorite and I'm surprised it's not used more.