Radio promotion goes very wrong

Michael Hedges April 11, 2009 Follow on Twitter

Drawing crowds appeals to a media persons inner marketing brain. Radio stations are the long standing champions at calling people to action, social media a recent challenger. Crowds, though, are unpredictable.

Czech regional station Kiss Radio South Bohemia was promoting itself with a “Kiss Cash” campaign. On-air listeners heard about free money, CZK 100,000 (less than €4,000), to be given away in the form of convertible CZK 50 (about €2) vouchers. All people had to do was show up at the Ceske Budejovice town center, the King Otaker II Square. Ceske Budejovice is the regional capital of South Bohemia. Beer worshipers will know the city by its local name Budweis, the home of the real Budweiser beer.

At 3 o’clock (1500 CET) last Tuesday (April 7) a DJ perched on a construction crane platform high above the crowd started tossing the vouchers. People abandoned all sense, it appears, and dove for them. More than two dozen were injured, many children, as people trampled each other. Two children were hospitalized in intensive care.

Officials estimated the crowd at seventeen thousand. Ceské Budejovice mayor Juraj Thoma called it “an absolutely hysterical reaction.” Local television and newspapers carried wide ranging condemnations, mostly of the disorderly crowd, and pictures of ambulances.

Station director Milan Mraz, quoted a day later by local media (April 8), offered, figuratively, only name, rank and serial number. “The only official position… is that Kiss Radio South Bohemia broadcasts in Ceské Budejovice,” he said. More details would not be forthcoming because “competing media does not provide any information.” Media watchers said the station made no mention on-air of the incident. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

Marketing promotions can go wrong. There are countless examples. The first lesson learned by those who have gone before is to expect the unexpected. And as a crowd grows so too are opportunities for the unexpected. Little attention in the planning, apparently, was given to security and crowd control. Fewer than 20 police officers were on the scene and, according to Mayor Thoma, most just stood around. The station had hired private security, but too few. A concert promoters’ rule-of-thumb on security and crowd control is at least one uniformed security person for every 300 in the crowd. Seventeen thousand people, if that estimate is correct, is a rock concert.

Planning for every possible outcome, including the ugly, means thinking through each moment, from first announcement to finally taking credit for a success and everything in between. Spontaneous promotions lead to spontaneous failure. This is, of course, show business.

The Kiss Radio promotion became a disaster. The primary purpose for crowd-drawing promotions is the picture it can present. A promotion fails when the picture people are left with includes ambulances.

Two mistakes in thinking, it seems, made this a prescription for pain. Crowd-drawing promotions are ego-trips. Handing out money, in this case fully convertible vouchers, is brain-dead. Few promotion directors, noting successes and failures of the last three decades, would attempt either.  None would put the two together.

Radio broadcasters invented meet-ups, now credited to Twitter-generation media. The human voice has great drawing power, elemental to radios’ lasting branding capacity. The third and most important mistake made was being unprepared. Video of the incident is now a YouTube item. Instead of positive brand building media coverage Kiss Radio must now contend with constant reminders of the mistakes. 

Contacted by local sources, Czech media regulator RRTV Chairman Vaclav Zak said he’d received no complaints and, anyway, radio promotions are “outside the RRTV’s competence.”