Radio’s New Contesting Conundrum

The recession must officially be over.

CBS is bringing back contesting to its radio stations in 35 cities nationwide. That's a luxury radio operators could not afford when advertising sales were tanking.

Unfortunately, the contesting that is coming back is national in scope. That is -- listeners in 35 markets are competing for the same prizes. In the CBS example, $250,000 in prizes.

Clear Channel underwhelmed the industry before the recession by engineering national contests and I'm not so sure they weren't a little bit sneaky about the fact that local listeners were competing with listeners in other Clear Channel&hellip