More than 15 years ago, I wrote a column called When Contest Winners Will Not Scream. It was prompted by daily radio listening where, on station after station, I could count on hearing a frustrated DJ try to cajole a recalcitrant winner into showing more excitement, even if they were at work. Even I those pre-Pandora days, it made stations sound desperate, plus even those listeners who did scream appreciatively were a throwback to an era of high-energy radio that no longer existed in any other way.
When Contest Winners Will Not Scream was one of the best read, most circulated Ross on Radio columns and instantly prompted dozens of reader comments. In the intervening years, the problem has “solved itself,” sort of. The draconian on-air tightness of the early PPM ratings measurement era meant fewer and briefer listener calls. Then it became harder to get callers for anything. Now we have imaging packages that supply the enthusiastic callers for us. The sweeper with the canned “you guys are great” or “it’s all I ever listen to” is the new cliché—as irritating now as “I can’t scream; I’m at work.”
There are also fewer on-air winners because radio has switched to one major contest with no on-air payoff. “Text-the-national-codeword-to-win” contesting is hour after hour of multiple station on the dial doing an almost identical execution of a promotion with no entertainment value for the casual listener. Sometimes there might be a recorded promo of national winners. Mostly, the contest disappears into the ether until the next hour. Big-money group-wide contesting has been heralded over the years as the best of what nationalized radio could offer, but if it’s done anything to benefit us, I shudder to think about what time spent with radio would look like otherwise.
Recently, I had an epiphany.
We could have screaming contest winners again, if we wanted. More than ever, working listeners are not all at the office. Yes, that situation is fluid. Yes, many listeners were never able to stay home. But “I’ve got to keep it down, I’m at work” is indeed less of an issue now. It could, I suppose, have been replaced a few years ago by “I’ve got to keep it down, the kids are remote learning,” but there was nothing to give away then anyway. I’m surprised that it took so long for this to occur to me, but it just shows how contesting is less top-of-mind now.
I asked Twitter followers and Facebook friends if they had heard a screaming winner call or promo recently. “To have that, you have to have callers, and someone to answer the phone, which are both in decreasing supply,” posted Will LaTulippe. (I also asked who had heard any clever promotions lately. “My last station had callers tell them why Limp Bizkit sucks—to win Limp Bizkit tickets!” he said.)
I don’t know that I really want the screaming contest winner back, but it would be novel again, at least for a minute. “Brilliant at the basics” is something I hear less and less these days, and I’m always happy when I encounter it. In that regard, I’m easily impressed, and I wish I were more often impressed that way. The effectiveness of on-air contesting is indeed tied up in a lot of issues including budgets, staffing, the ability to externally market our efforts, a lack of showmanship, and our own fatalism about whether radio can ever generate a listener reaction again.
I do know that I want to hear more contest creativity again—both in terms of generating new promotional ideas and executing the old ones with more gusto. Country programmers are genuinely excited about the ability to give away concert tickets again. I recently heard Country WIVK Knoxville, Tenn., packaging concert, amusement park, and other contests as the “Summer of 7,000 Giveaways.”
When I asked readers what radio contesting they’d liked recently, there were a lot of old standbys—“guess the secret sound”; AC CHFI Toronto’s “Name the Celebrity Voices”; Hits Radio UK’s Cash Register—a “cash call variant”; Heart UK’s “Make Me A Millionaire 2022.” These aren’t surprising examples because the U.K., Canada, and Australia have all shown more commitment to contesting and promotional creativity over the last two decades. It was also Canada where I recently encountered what I only half-jokingly called “the greatest radio stunt ever.”
I also want to hear listeners on the air again, even though I’m fully aware of the challenges, because it creates community and proves to listeners that their peers are still engaged with radio. Talking to and not at listeners is a key tenet of radio; now it’s the thing that separates us from both playlist and podcast. We have seen that listener interaction is a valuable commodity, particularly for BBC Radio 2 and Canada’s CKNO (Now 102.3) Edmonton, Alberta, and the stations inspired by it.
A good caller is different these days. I recently heard an “impossible contest” variant on CKRY (Country 105) Calgary, Alberta, where the winner knew that 20% of people would consider a nude vacation. The jock asked if he would. “Not anymore,” said the caller. These days, good sportsmanship and just being able to return the host’s serve is as important as the volume at which they do so.
