There’s a scavenger hunt in Vancouver. Rock Roulette in Edmonton. Shopping sprees in Toronto. Even a mystery concert at an unnamed venue promoted by an Ottawa station.

This must mean there’s a spring radio book in the making.

There is.

Following this well-trodden promotional path are such stations as The Fox in Vancouver, The Bear in Edmonton, its den mate The Bear in Ottawa, and The Fan in Toronto.

Chris Pandoff, general manager of Vancouver’s cfox, says the station has a scavenger hunt under way with the winner or winning team picking up $10,000 cash.

Listeners have to gather about 30 items over five weeks. Some are easy to find, such as certain publications, and some, such as a copy of the 1979 Vancouver Seeds vinyl album of Canadian talent, are appreciably less so.

Those listeners who have collected the requisite items, says Pandoff, will then meet in a local club where the winner will be announced.

Pandoff says the contest will help ratings because, in order to play, listeners have to tune in.

Also, he continues, because some of the items chosen for the hunt are interesting or obscure, even those listeners not playing will tune in to satisfy their curiosity.

Another example of a spring book-related promotion is Rock Roulette at Standard Broadcasting’s The Bear, cfrb-am in Edmonton.

Marty Forbes, general manager of cfbr and its sister station cfrn-fm, says Rock Roulette is running for eight weeks, coinciding with the eight weeks listener diaries are kept for the spring ratings.

Prizes up for grabs at cfbr, says Forbes, are such things as a trip to Las Vegas and a motorcycle.

Contest players have to listen to songs played on air, and after successfully identifying them they get to choose what’s behind door number one, two or three, for a chance at a prize.

‘The reasons [stations run contests are] to take care of that quota of your audience that likes to play contests, and to enhance the image of the radio station,’ says Forbes.

Each radio station should run a promotion around the ratings periods, he continues, and of course it should be both entertaining and in sync with its format.

A further spring book promotion comes from all sports The Fan, cjcl-am in Toronto, a Telemedia station.

Bob Mackowycz, operations manager for The Fan, says the station has a joint promotion going with the Toronto Blue Jays and The Toronto Sun.

Called ‘Back in the Swing of Things,’ Mackowycz notes the contest provides experiences no other station can hope to duplicate, such as a chance to warm up in the Blue Jays bull pen, to broadcast one inning of a Blue Jays game, with the grand prize making the winner a Blue Jay for a Day. To win, listeners have to answer Blue Jays trivia questions at certain times of the day.

Yet despite the best intentions of the stations behind these promotions and others, much of the evidence suggests they are little more than ‘me tooism.’As Mackowycz puts it, station managers ‘feel naked’ if they’re not doing anything on the contest front during ratings periods.

Gary Aube, general manager of ckqb-fm in Ottawa, which has a Molson Canadian Wall of Rock promotion on during the spring ratings weeks, isn’t at all sure contests can be singled out as generating increased listenership.

Higher ratings, says Aube, could be attributed to new on-air talent, different music within the station’s format, a contest, or a combination of all three. It’s hard to tell, he continues, as there are no non-contest period data with which to compare contest-dominated ratings weeks.

Pandoff, at Shaw Communications’ The Fox, says contests at ratings time are entirely tactical.

‘The strategy of a radio station is what they do every day between the songs, what songs they play, how the music is presented, what their announcers sound like,’ says Pandoff.

‘Promotion is tactical in nature. Partly our competitors are doing it [so The Fox does it]. Also there’s a chance [stations] can win some ballots by spending a pile of money in a short period of time.’

Gary Miles, executive vice-president of radio operations for Rogers Broadcasting, is another industry executive who isn’t sold on ratings promotions.

Miles, who’s responsible for such stations as ckiss-fm in Vancouver and chfi-fm in Toronto, says providing consistency for listeners is the best approach, noting Rogers stations run promotions through the year rather than just during ratings weeks. In his experience, Miles continues, promotions used tactically during ratings weeks don’t work any better in one format than another.

Keith Soaper, general manager at choz-fm in St. John’s, a station owned by Newfoundland Broadcasting and heard across the province, says choz considers itself to be in ratings 12 months a year and doesn’t do anything much different during spring and fall. (Newfoundland, like other smaller markets, only gets two books a year. Major markets get three: spring, summer, fall.)

choz will do eight to 10 contests a year on average, eight to 12 months a year, says Soaper, with ‘flyaways’ to rock concerts or musicals popular because of Newfoundland’s location off the main entertainment path.

‘I really think it’s a fallacy or a myth that you’re going to spark a lot of listeners simply because you’re doing a contest. It would have to be one heck of a contest to bring a lot of people in,’ says Soaper.

However, David Bray, senior vice-president at Toronto’s Radioworks, a full service radio ad agency, isn’t so sure contests have no merit.

‘Instead of just hours tuned you bring new people to play the contests and do all the other things. Certainly, there are instances where it’s worked admirably and instances where it’s been less than successful, but that’s not surprising,’ says Bray.

In an Angus Reid Radio Research/Bohn & Associates Media Poll conducted after the beginning of the fall 1994 ratings period (Sept. 26 to Oct. 2), respondents were asked if ratings contests made a difference to their listening habits.

The answer was a resounding no.

The study found 66% of Canadians were unaware of the fall ratings contests, and 28% of respondents indicated the contests were having ‘absolutely no impact’ on their radio listening.

Further, the study found just 1% of all Canadians said these contests were encouraging them to spend more time listening to a station other than the one they tune into most often.

About 3% of the respondents said they were listening more often to their regular stations because of ratings contests, and 2% actually reported they tuned out of stations running ratings contests.

Contests during ratings weeks, said the survey, are by far most effective among listeners aged 18 to 24. Contest participation in this demographic was 11%, nearly three times the national average of 4%.

But once above that age group ratings contests can generate nearly as much tune out as tune in, the survey found. The older the listener the less likely contests will increase audience numbers.

Despite radio’s enduring fondness for ratings related promotions, it seems the practice’s demise will start some time next year when BBM Bureau of Measurement introduces a new way of counting listeners.

Now, in major markets across the country, there are three ratings books: spring, summer and fall with selected households keeping diaries of the listening habits of those aged 12+. Each ratings period lasts eight weeks.

In 1997, bbm will survey listeners two weeks of every month for 12 months a year and supply rolling average data every 30 days.

Owen Charlebois, president of bbm, says the time of the switch isn’t certain yet, but when it comes it will be pretty much seamless.

Marc Paris, vice-president and general manager of EZRock 97.3 in Toronto, defends the use of ratings contests, but says starting next year when bbm measures audiences 12 months a year, all bets are off.

‘I think that`s going to affect the strategy and the marketing of radio stations substantially because nobody will be able to sustain the level of expenditure that stations do in those eight week periods all through the year,’ says Paris.

In fact, he continues, EZRock 97.3 is starting to plan now in anticipation of the coming measurement changes.

One of the things Paris suspects will happen once the monthly surveys are in place is stations will react more quickly if an element of their on-air presentation isn’t working.

One of the big problems now, he continues, is waiting four or five months for data, which is too long.

Bray says the new measurement won’t bring radically different results from what the ratings books report now, but most likely there’ll be more trading of market share among the stations.

Jeff Vidler, manager of radio research at Angus Reid, says the changes in measurement will have an impact on the industry. It will take a while to see media trends emerge, he says, but when they do come they’ll be true not ‘sample wobble.’

Soaper at choz agrees. Twelve times a year measurement will provide more statistically reliable data to stations and advertisers, he says.