Great plan! Let 210 people go. Use the money to buy an expensive condo. Give it away to a CHUM FM listener. 
Ratings?

Last edited by Radiowiz (August 5, 2021 3:23 pm)

I doubt they spent much, if anything. In most cases, the company provides the prize in exchange for a ton of free publicity, which beats buying advertising time. Friday Harbour likely got more free mentions than they would have otherwise, with a contest that ran for ages and plastered their name over every promo and plug. If Bell contributed any money to this thing, I'm willing to bet it wasn't full price!

I know CFTR bought the syndicated "The Last Contest" in its rock heyday. I think it was out of KFRC. They offered boats, planes, vacations, yachts, sportscars, you name it, stuff worth thousands and thousands of dollars.

The gimmick, of course, was all those amazing unheard-of prizes were promoed for months, but they only gave out the secret phone number twice in the entire contest. 

So they promised all this great stuff but never had to give any of it away. That was the brilliance of it. 

I remember one of the two winners foolishly picked a limo to pick up her and take her home from work for a year. She could have had a car or a world tour vacation. And that's what she chose!

I recall there used to be limits on how much prizewinners could get in Canadian radio contests. They were quite low, like around $5,000 as late as the '70s. Doesn't anyone remember that?

Here's some more info on The Last Contest. The comments section offers more detail.

http://reelradio.com/ricky/lastcon.html#lastcon 

 

Dale Patterson wrote:

I recall there used to be limits on how much prizewinners could get in Canadian radio contests. They were quite low. Doesn't anyone remember that?

Here's some more info on The Last Contest. The comments section offers more detail.

http://reelradio.com/ricky/lastcon.html#lastcon 

 

You are right Dale, there were limitations but I am not sure what amount it was.  I know 1050 chum was giving away a car a week sometime in the early 70's in the summer and I think they gave away Corvettes or Camaros again back in the 70's, but I don't know if it was one or a bunch of them.  Doug Thompson would be the one to know about this and what the limits were.  I know that CHUM FM Break The Bank has offered $500,000 but I don't know if anyone has ever won this amount.  So the $725,000 condo is getting up there.

John Landecker mentioned in his book that this was something he liked about Canadian radio when he was at CFTR. The fact that stations couldn't buy off the audience during ratings.  He felt giving away big amounts of money just inflated ratings for certain stations during the survey period.  So I guess back in the early 80's some major market US stations must have been giving away a lot of big prizes or money.  But we did have maximum amounts here.  Now maybe now not so much. 

There was also this similar contest to CHUM's with KiSS 92.5 (in 2019):
https://contestsincanada.com/kiss-92-5-win-a-home-from-roz-mocha-sequoia-grove-homes-promotion-win-a-new-home-at-winahome-kiss925-com/

Last edited by Radio.Intern (August 5, 2021 11:00 pm)

I once won a copy of a book for correctly answering the CityPulse News Test question...

I remember CFTR  having the "Last Contest" in the summer of 1972. The station planned to announce the secret telephone number at 8AM. I think they were going to accept the 68th or maybe the 680th caller. What I remember most was the 10 minutes of rules, instructions etc. that were calmly read by an authoritative sounding voice before the actual phone number was given out. What I don't remember is who won and the prize chosen.