Today's Friday Poll question asks:
How does your station get involved with your local county fair?
Do you have an on-site presence at the fair?
Do you sell “fair packages” to support attendance? Fair reports? Live broadcasts?
In what ways does your station capitalize on this annual event to benefit your station, listeners, and advertisers?
Looking forward to hearing how you do it! Thanks.
For our local County Fair, we worked out a deal where we ran bonus ads in exchange for a space in one of the exhibit buildings. They still bought a schedule as well.
We broadcast as much as we could for the three big days at the fair, Thursday, Friday and Saturday and tried to interview as many people associated with the fair that we could.
For community support, we went out and sold sponsorship's for our broadcasts from the fair and they were mentioned in our promos prior to the fair and also during our fair remotes. Each sponsor received 10 thirty second spots that ran during fair week as part of the package.
Since we just acquired the station back in January, we used the fair to roll out our station bumper sticker (!) and used it for the listeners to put a face with the voice they had been hearing
Our stations have a heavy presence in three surrounding counties, so we spend MUCH of our August at 3 County Fairs. We have our station vehicle/trailer at each fair where are entire staff (DJ, sales, interns and office manager) are required to take shifts to work, we broadcast live, we sell fair reports, fair sponsorships and we always run a contest where we have a main sponsor at each fair. At one of our fairs that we broadcast our daily live shows, we sell "Sponsor of the Day" plans. Fairs are a big deal in our area, and we make sure we bring the coverage to our area!
Douglas hosts the Wyoming State Fair, so the County Fair here is a small, "qualifying" activity for 4H kids. We do have 4H kids come in and voice PSA's promoting the daily events and the Market Sale that closes the county fair.
KKTY does several packages for the State Fair, including one that has a daily live report from the fair. We have a mini-bus, "The Big Broadcast Bus", that I've set up as a remote studio, pulled most of the seats & put a desk and a fan and mini-fridge in it. State Fair comps us a space with power along the Midway. I'm down there from 10a til 6p daily. I think I sold a dozen reports daily M-F from the fair... interviews with kids & judges, schedule updates, recorded live on my smartphone, edited & produced with Adobe Audition on a laptop in the bus. It's a lot of work, but it's great visibility & community relations, and we make good money off of it.
We do lots of ticket giveaways week before and week of... I'm in the crows nest for the demolition derby... on stage for the concerts... and we broadcast the State Fair Parade live via Marti on Saturday morning.
Up here in the mountains, I've done some pro bono work for our local radio station, which is listener-supported and has one full-time, paid DJ in afternoon drive. They promote a night at the county fair is have a night where members come for a barbecue, hang out with the station staff, and then go sit together in a block of seats at the rodeo.
Our stations have had a long relationship with the county fair board of directors. Each year they place a significant schedule with us which runs on all three stations. For our part we broadcast live from the fair for several evenings. We also do a daily 4H report that carries the results of their competition. In addition we produce a "fair package" for advertisers which encourages attendance at the fair. We also report on various activities as news stories as well.
Having worked on the "event" side before, I can tell you the carnival is where the real money is to market a fair. A good carnival understands they have to spend money to drive traffic.
We have a really great relationship with the local Ag Society that puts on our county fair. They invest a fair chunk and we come along side that and really get behind it. Our fair is coming up in fact and we have a two day live on location planned, we have rodeo reports planned that are sponsored, we broadcast the parade live and that broadcast is also sponsored and for two weeks leading up to the fair we invite Ag Society members into the station for short interviews to highlight certain aspects of the event. It sounds really good and we love being involved at this level!
