NIENABER: The Twelve Bits Of Christmas

THE MOUTH, DECEMBER 9TH 2013 –– We spend our entire lives trying to create and stretch premise in search of content. And then, along come little reminders of a Higher Being: Hallmark Holidays. Things that you don’t need to be a Mensa candidate to take, spin, exploit and turn into something a little more fun then Battle Of The Sexes.

With that said, between now and the 23rd should be Christmas Christmas Christmas. If only because in two months we’re going to be sitting and trying to create a bit out of thin air. Here is everything I can think of and find that you could play with.

Product Testing It’s not just the Sham Wow, but that little piece of plastic that scrunches and hides bra straps, or the other piece of plastic that makes caulking easy. You can’t turn on the tube without seeing some kind of weird offer. Do a day of putting them to the test so that your listeners won’t waste precious money on crap.

Giftervention Everyone knows someone who is mentally challenged when it comes to buying gifts. The phrase “What the Hell was he thinking?” was actually coined by me and my siblings in regards to my father’s attempts to gift my mom. Every freaking year. He was well-intentioned. Maybe too much so. Have a listener set up a friend or family member for an ambush and confrontation. Then send them out (with maybe some client giftcards) and a professional shopper (which could be one of the morning show) to make sure that this year they don’t screw it up.

“When I Was A Kid…” If you go on Flickr, you can finds scads© of images from old Sears Wish Book catalogues. That’s what they called the Christmas edition. JC Penney too.

Dirtiest Holiday Jobs Not just a topic, but a straight to the web video bit as the morning show exchanges positions for a day.

Re-Gift It Forward In a perfect world, this would be trackable on the website. Morning guy gets a plastic watch from “Alvin And The Chipmunks 3D” that came in a Burger King kids meal 2 years ago. He trades it to a listener for a logoed Coors Light bottle opener. Listener trades it….you get the idea. See how far it goes and what people get.

Morning Show Christmas Pageant As opposed to The Voice or Glee. For all the listeners who didn’t get chosen to be in the school’s production…finally…sweet revenge. And the audience will be way larger then the crowded masses in the gym. Write up a quick play about holidays at your station. Throw in some “standards” and you’re set.

Santa Idol A talent competition in-studio between mall Santas.

Merry Matrimony You know what no station has ever done? Marry Santa. You could either find a mall Santa in a long relationship and you ambush his girlfriend at work. Or you bring in “Mr. and Mrs. Claus” to renew their vows on the air. Surrounded by elves.

Single Mom Seeks Santa I think this was a Crystal Bernard/Steve Guttenberg movie. But I digress. From Shane Collins at Mainline in Louisville: what if a station hosted a single mom's "santa's workshop" where mom's could bring those "hard to put together" toys and single guys could help them put them together. So on Christmas morning they're already assembled for the kids. Does a few things -- warm and fuzzy because it helps out single mom's, allows single mom's to meet single guys...who are cool with them having kids

Scroogiest Boss Contest It's not a "given" that companies throw Christmas parties for their employees. In fact, many don't. Why not host a Scroogiest Boss contest on the morning show and have people call in with stories about how cheap their employers were. Throw a giant nightclub party for the staffs of all these companies. We did this when I was at Wild and it was big. At one company, the boss had used the money designated for a staff party and took his wife to the Bahamas for New Years!

Holiday Party At The Station Alice in Denver did this. They got a guy who played piano at malls during the shopping season. He set up in the lobby. They had punch, cookies, mistletoe, a tree. People from downtown buildings could wander over throughout the day to meet the staff, mingle, register for prizes. On the air, which is all that really matters, it sounded like December 23rd. What a freaking concept.

Hospital Visits An oldie but a goodie. Unless you've never dressed as Santa and gone to children hospitals, you'll never know how large of a promotion this is. ‘DVD in Detroit did this for Halloween and it was huge.

Bash Crashing When I was in Sacramento in December ‘06 there were no less then four MAJOR events happening at the hotel. I was just two drinks away from getting the old KSFM receptionist to go crash them as “employees”. (There is SO a bit here.) Katfish and Kornicky from Live 88.5 in Ottawa did Bash Krashers. Here is the explanation: We crash company parties with a "ride" program, 1000.00 from a shopping centre and a comedian who does 20-30 minutes of stand-up......We actually help liven up their office parties and get them to listen to us at a set time, next day, when we playback some audio (get IDs while you're there). They really appreciate it and love the sober ride home aspect, too.

Office Party Etiquette Just to open up the phones and have listeners regale you with stupid things that they’ve done or witnessed, would be large. Or, head off some of these disasters.

Memories Of Christmas Laps For the month of December, your jock photos in the Bio section of your website should be replaced with old pictures of them as kids on Santa’s lap.

Because They’re Just So Damned Cute Solicit crying baby pics from listeners. Much like these or any of a thousand other galleries.

Unstrung Heroes Who hasn't spent an hour sitting on the living room floor, trying to untangle balls of lights from the previous Christmas? This bit would have each member of the morning show bringing their own lights down to the station. Each would have one listener assigned to them and the person who completely untangle all of their jocks lights first, wins.

The Free Pee Tree From Bill at Jacobs Media. You get a big lot full of trees. You walk your dog through the lot and it has five minutes to mark a tree. If it does, you win it.

Knockoff Christmas From Toby Knapp at Hot 99.5 in DC: knock off xmas… contest we did at WNOK when i was there – to make fun of the stations doing ‘pick a purse’… we sent someone out in nyc to buy the best fakes money could by… and we gave ‘em to you all holiday long… with the ‘night show knock off xmas’watches, wallets, louis and dooney… we had ‘em all… and no one would know they were fakes… unless you told ‘em
Pet Photos Seemingly half of you did Pet Costumes for Halloween. Get a Santa and a photographer and have them in the station one morning for people to bring their pets by. KUBE in Seattle did this at a clients location.

Tight Red Body Stockings What little kids didn’t try to figure out what they were getting just by shaking and feeling their package? Now, you take the morning guy, put him in a tight red full body body stocking with some prize/gift in his upper thigh area. You win it by guessing it and you guess it by feeling and shaking his package.

Holiday Analysis Christmas is always a bad time for depression. Be sure to get a therapist on the morning show to discuss the topic and things that people can do to stay "up" during this traditionally tough time of the year.

Toy Review Once again, you could use a Toys 'R Us client for this. Get them to bring a load of their toys to the morning show. Also have a bunch of kids, representing both sexes and various age groups, in the studio to try out the toys and review them.

Settle Down Rusty!!! Wrong movie. Sorry. But KZIA in Cedar Rapids sent their stunt guy, Water Boy, out to do a Clark Griswold-inspired tree trimming job on listeners’ trees. Never too many lights.

A Griswold Christmas A great Engineer is like McGyver. You can go to him/her and say “Here’s what we want to do. Now help us pull it off.” As witnessed by KZIA in Cedar Rapids where they went and turned a listeners’ home into a flashing booming monstrosity. Lights synched to “Nut Rocker”.

Trans Nebraska Orchestra No less then 800 versions of the Trans Siberian Orchestra will be on the road this December. If you have tickets to give away, get a caller, put them on hold, call a truck stop in Nebraska and play a hook over the phone to whoever picks up. If they ID the song, your caller gets the TSO tickets.

Biggest Gainer One of the stations has a fitness club that needs a promotion. Very simple. You weigh in the morning show. Weigh them in again on January 2. The listener who guesses the exact (or closest without going over) amount of weight that the combined show has packed on over the holidays, gets a membership.

December Fools Every market has a few households that are historic for stupidly garish light displays. Chris Taylor, now with Flinn in Memphis, did this at Mix in KC. The morning show talked about the newest competitor for “most lights” and “biggest display”. A home in the suburbs where the owner had put up 1.8 millions lights, had a pully/cable system that flew a sleigh across the yard every 90 seconds, had a giant castle over 100 feet tall (lit internally) made entirely of 5X5 blocks of ice that were trucked in from northern Michigan, and even a hayride through a snow cave that had elves of all different nationalities singing “It’s A Small World”. They aired lots and lots of “listeners” talking about how they’d gone and how great it was and it was better then Disneyland. It was at the intersection of two streets that didn’t intersect.

Santa Scared Straight From Fly 92 in Albany: We do “Santa Scared Straight.” People email us specific stories about something major their child did that was bad. Then, we have Santa call them just a week before Christmas to warn them to be good or they will get no presents.

Random Acts Of Holiday Destruction Invicta FM in Kent did “Trash Your Tree For A Nintendo Wii”. The name says it all; destroy your fully decorated tree for a chance to win a Wii.

The Biggest Name/Card Dropper Do a contest to see what listeners get a holiday card from “the most famous person” (as judged by the morning show)

Rating The Santa They did this in the Minneapolis paper a couple of years ago and it was great. They took some children out to various malls and rate the Santas on such criteria as Best Facial Hair and Lap Comfort. Your morning show could do this with the kids of your staff and bring them in on Monday morning to reveal the results of their research.

The Phlarmy This was THE hot toy in 2002. At least according to Dave Ryan at KDWB, who played it up like, well, duh: who doesn't know about this ultimate Christmas toy. And Dave had the last three of them. Local toys stores were flooded by calls from stressed out parents who heard the bit and were terrified that they'd missed the boat on this toy. Also done at The Stoydi (or “idiots” kind of, spelled backwards) at a station in the UK where they even ran spots for the faux toy.

Mall Santa Makeovers This has TV coverage written all over it. Get some stylists and make-up people to do in-studio make overs for local mall Santas.

Chimney Races Dressed as Santa and hauling a sack of presents, listeners would compete to see who could crawl through inverted tubes.
Reindeer Hunt Jammin’ in Portland hid a plastic lawn deer and whenever they did a Stocking Stuffer on the air, they gave out a clue. The person who retrieved the deer won a Nintendo Gamecube. Easily could be a morning show bit for a few days.

Absolutely. But now you have less of an excuse to fall back on old cliché bits and 40 minutes rambling conversations about Kim Kardashian.