Worst Contest Ever!

When I started writing about KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM, I mentioned that we launched the station by giving away money, as much as $1,000 at a time. By doing this, we got EVERYONE'S attention and people were carrying around their pieces of paper with "The Zoo 108" written out 108 times in the hopes that somebody from our station would come up and ask them who they listen to on the radio.

While this was not the worst contest ever, I did have issues with it and I want to address those here before I move on to the actual contest to which the title alludes. I know that owner Jid wanted to make a big splash. I know that the $1,000 created prize a lot of excitement, but we would have been better off giving out $108 at a time instead. I know that made everyone go crazy over our station, but I'm pretty certain that everyone would have been practically as bonkers if we were handing a lower amount. I mean, if we were going to give away a total of $6,000 in that contest, we could have had 60 winners instead of six. Because the station never generated the ad sales momentum needed to sustain the contest, people started losing interest until we started giving away money again.

In the middle of one of our money giveaway droughts, we announced a new contest. It was the "$25,000 Bank Rip Off." According to the promos, one of our listeners was going to get a chance to win up to $25,000. Keep in mind, the promos said, "up to."

In order for one lucky listener to get to do that, they had to guess the identities of the "KZZO Superstars." We had the voices of four people that were played in extremely brief soundbites at the beginning of the contest. We would give the signal for listeners to call in, let them listen to the voices and try to figure out who they were. Over the course of the next few weeks, the soundbites got longer and longer until there was almost no way the average person couldn't figure out who they were.

Before we started the contest, we heavily promoted it for a couple of weeks. It really did build up a lot of excitement. We employees were thrilled at the prospect that we were going to be giving away money again, because we had been besieged with calls from listeners asking when they could expect another harvest from the "money tree." Even though we hadn't given any cash away in a long time, we continued to run promos saying that we were.

The four "Superstars" were George C. Scott, George Burns, Jane Fonda and Ed McMahon. The first version had the bites at less than a second each and there was this bizarre noise playing underneath them, so you really couldn't figure out who they were. I remember Dr. D calling one of his friends to record a prototype call so we could hear how the contest was supposed to be run live on the air. He played the voices and the person on the other end of the phone just started gasping. He was not expecting it to be that difficult. He made a few guesses, but he was nowhere close to identifying any of the voices. One of the things we were told was that if the caller asked if they could hear the voices again, we had to tell them no.

As it turned out, we only ran the "Superstars" part of the contest between 7am and 5pm Monday through Friday. This meant that I never got to do the contest during my shifts. After a couple of weeks, I noticed that the soundbites had indeed gotten longer and that callers were easily able to identify the first three voices. But that fourth voice, Ed McMahon, was the only one that never got a bite that was long enough for anyone to clearly hear. Because of this, Jid was able to completely control what day we would finally get our winner.

One weekend, we ran a promo that said that the soundbites were going to be much longer when we returned to the contest on Monday. I don't remember why, but I had to go to the station that day. When I arrived, Dr. D told me they had gotten the Bank Rip Off winner that morning. He played the tape for me. It was a woman who called in. The voices were played and the first three soundbites ran for at least 15 seconds each and without that bizarre noise in the background. When it got to Ed McMahon, it was one of his intros from "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson." It was a full production with the music and everything, leading up to "Heeeeeere's Johnny!"

There was a chance that the woman was going to say the fourth voice was Johnny Carson. Fortunately, she didn't do that. She got all four voices correct and was going to get to do the contest the next Saturday. We started promoting the heck out of the Bank Rip Off, making it clear that this woman was going to get to win up to $25,000.

The week before the contest, we got our paychecks. I went to the station's bank to cash it. They told me there wasn't enough money in the account for them to cash the check. This happened to be the bank where we were holding the Rip Off. I left empty-handed. On my way out, I saw the display promoting the contest that weekend. I got angry and drove to the station. Nobody there could help me with the money situation. It was bad because I didn't even have enough for gas to get back to Portales. Dr. D (who had apprently been able to cash his check) reached in his pocket and gave me a $5 bill. It helped.

I had to continue my rant on how angry I was that, here we are, we're going to let one of our listeners walk off with $25,000 and we didn't have enough to cover my $50 paycheck. Then Dr. D told me something shocking. He said that the winner would be lucky if they got more than $2,000. I didn't say anything at the time, but my first thought was that would be a terrible outcome. I mean, $2,000 is a lot of money and it's twice our largest prize, but it's rather piddly compared to $25,000. I was thinking that if the winner were to get at least $10,000, that would look really good. At the time, that amount was more than enough to buy a new car. But $2,000 would only make a decent down-payment. This was starting to look like Superfest all over again, and we barely survived the fallout from that.

Dr. D said the justification for the prize amount being so low was that if it came out to more than $3,000, it would have to be claimed as income on the winner's tax return. That didn't really fly with me, but I knew there was nothing I could do about it.

So the big day came. There were a hundred people gathered at the bank, waiting for what would be a pretty spectacular event. I got to go inside the vault. There was a table with 100 cloth bags that were filled with rolled coins. I was told that the way they would count the money the winner received was by a slip of paper in each bag that said how much was inside. Each bag had a different amount in it.

The winner arrived. She was a woman in her early 30's. She was married and had children. She had medium-length blonde hair and was fairly thin and pretty. She was excited about getting this opportunity to score some cash. In the days that preceded the Rip Off, the winner was told about the rules. The main one was that she had to carry the bags in her hands. She couldn't wear a skirt and try to carry the money that way. (That wouldn't have worked anyway, because the rolled coins would have ripped through anything that wasn't re-inforced leather.) She would have to start outside, run in the bank, into the vault and grab what she was able to carry. She would then have to run outside and put the bags on a table at the start point. After she put down the bags, she could run back inside as many times as possible within the 108 second time limit.

I overheard her husband telling someone that he had a dream about the Rip Off in which his wife ran inside the bank and it took a long while for her to come back out. When she did, she was wearing completely different clothes, like we had made her change her outfit after she grabbed the money.

I got to provide the device for the countdown. It was my digital watch. I set it for 108 seconds and started it. The woman ran inside the bank. She came back out carrying four bags, two in each hand. She put them down on the table and repeated this three more times. On the final trip, she slowed down the last few seconds for dramatic effect while we were counting them down.

About 15 minutes later, they added up the slips of paper that were in each bag. The total came to $2,610. JF excitedly exclaimed, "Wow! You got more than 10% of the total amount!" The winner, bless her heart, put on a good face for us, but I know she was disaapointed that she didn't get more. I remember her husband talking to one of the other employees. He asked if the bags with the most money were on the bottom of the pile. The answer he was given was "We don't know."

I hope you've realized this much: She grabbed 16 bags out of 100 that were in the vault. If the bags had equal amounts of $250 each, she would have gotten 16% of the total, not 10%. That math would have made it come out to $4,000. I don't know for a fact how the bags were set up, like if the larger amounts were on the bottom or scattered throughout, but it was pretty clear that the bags with the smaller amounts were all placed up on top. If you're the one who gets to run into the vault, you're likely not going to try to figure out alternate ways to get the bags in the middle and bottom off the table because you'll lose a lot of time doing that. You're just going to grab what you can get your hands on and run outside. I'm certain some of the other rules included not being able to knock the table over. This actually would have been a safety concern. Nevertheless, it was still used to make certain the winner got as little money as possible.

As far as I know, we did not control the gender of the winner (but I'm certain it was possible). If it had been a man who won, we probably would have been in a lot more trouble because someone in decent shape could have carried six or eight bags at a time. A man might have also been able to grab the bags at the bottom without overturning the table.

Our promos following the Rip Off made it seem like $2,610 was a big deal as it was the most money anyone had ever won from a radio station in the region. But I got a lot of phone calls from listeners griping that the winner did not get enough money. I agreed with them because I certainly remembered how I felt just a few days earlier when I couldn't cash my paycheck. The funny thing was that Jid the owner thought the promotion was a great success. I guess he never actually realized how much damage that contest did to the image of the station and the morale of the employees.

Another thing that the promos declared was, "We're going to do it again next year!" NOOOOOooooo... Actually, we never did the contest again and I was so thankful that we didn't. I never received any phone calls the next year asking if we were going to keep our promise to do the contest again. I guess that's how well-received it was.

In hindsight, it probably would have been better to have the top prize amount be closer to $5,000, so by comparison, the winner would have gotten more than half the money. But of course, that would have meant re-engineering the way the game was played and it would have been a lot more work figuring out how to keep the final winnings down to around $2,500. Actually, it doesn't matter because the way we played it was still rigged.

Years later, when I worked at the newsradio station in San Jose, we had a similar contest in which we asked listeners to figure out all the voices that we had jumbled together in a mashup. As the days went by, we separated the voices a little more until someone was capable of guessing all five. The winner got a trip to Mexico WITHOUT having to go through an obstacle course. That was a much better contest.

It was nice to not have to experience a contest that let everyone down.