A Word About Contests

Listening to XM radio this afternoon, I heard an aircheck that had the old Hi-Lo contest. That reminded me of many of our contests at KAAY. Most involved audience participation. The normal format was three cuts on a cart machine. The open was played going into a record asking contestants to call. After the record, spots, and stuff, the contest intro was played, the contestant put on the air and the game was played. AFTER the winner was declared, the contest CLOSE was played. Often times, the jock forgot to run the close. Then when a new jock tried to play the contest again and got ready for the open, what he got was a CLOSE, making everyone look bad. A good jock would have played the cart thru on cue to make sure it was in the right position. Few did. Many a jock got caught. This was true with any of the carts that involved several segments. Like the news cart. It could contain many elements, i.e. an open, middle, weather intro, and close. Lord help if George J. Jennings was doing your news and you started him off with a bad cart intro. We usually has several different contests going at the same time. Some might require a mail entry. Others might require registering at a sponsor. There was great variety and not once did we just simply take "the 7th caller."