Fiendishly Successful Radio Promotional Stunts

[TheFugitive]

Keeping with the emerging theme of radio here:

What is the most outrageously successful promotional stunt you can ever recall being conducted by a radio station?

Here in Pittsburgh it has to be the well-remembered launch of 13Q in 1973.
This station had been WJAS, playing Adult Standards, before being sold and relaunching as a Top 40 station
with new call letters and the marketing handle "13Q".   They immediately found themselves up against
Pittsburgh's long-dominant Top 40 station KQV.

In order to attract attention they launched a promotion called the 13Q Cash Call.  They would randomly
call someone out of the phone book every hour.  There would be fifty or a hundred bucks in the jackpot...
something that was still considered attractive money at the time.  In order to win the person who answered
was required to say "I Listen to the New Sound of 13Q!".  Not "hello", not "good morning", it had to be
"I Listen to the New Sound of 13Q!"

Almost immediately you could not call ANYBODY in Pittsburgh without having the other end of the line
answered in that manner.  Pizza place?  Doctor's office? 911?  Did not matter, as everyone in town seemed
intent on winning that hundred bucks...no matter how ridiculous it made them sound.

I can't convey to you how many people here were answering their phones that way.  My father lined all us kids
up in the living room and read us the riot act on what would happen if he caught us answering HIS telephone
that way.

Four or five years later...long after the promotion had ended....you would still occasionally call someone in Pittsburgh
and have the other end of the call answered "I Listen to the New Sound of 13Q!"

Truly the work of an evil genius!

By early 1975 KQV had raised the white flag and gone All News.
13Q reverted back to WJAS under new owners a few years later.