Fortunes for the Outrageous : Radio Contests-for-Cash: How Far Will They Go?

If you don’t count the man who wanted to ride naked through downtown Denver in a wheelbarrow full of pudding or the youths who offered to blow up a rival radio station’s transmission tower, the low point of KPBI-FM’s “What Would You Do for $10,000?” contest probably was the time paramedics had to revive Contestant No. 3 from hypothermia suffered while towing a boatload of squealing piglets across a reservoir.

“It just doesn’t look good to kill your listeners,” Beth Harris, the station’s promotions director, said. That is why KPBI turned down the man who offered to set his car afire and drive into a brick wall.

These days, though, just about anything else goes in the wacky, tacky and mercilessly competitive world of radio contests.

Rock stations in at least six cities have given away plastic surgery. Listeners in Tennessee had a chance to win a funeral. One Texas station awarded an oil well. Weddings and divorces have become so commonplace as prizes that one station is considering offering a mail-order bride.

“The stations are in this unwritten war across the country to come up with the wildest sort of contest and giveaway they can do,” said Gary Reid, a telecommunications professor at Michigan State University.

“My copy of a Madonna album sounds just like your copy of a Madonna album,” he said, “so competition, for the most part now, is between promotions departments instead of programming departments.”

Even more bizarre than the prizes offered are the indignities people are willing to endure to win them. A 25-year-old Utah man swallowed a snake when radio station KJQ-FM co-sponsored a contest called, “What’s the Craziest Thing You Would Do for a Motorcycle and a Trip to California?”

He didn’t win.

First place went to 21-year-old Jenise Merrill, who covered herself in creamed corn and rolled in cornflakes, after having distinguished herself in the semifinals by smearing liquid cow manure on herself.

The contests have become “a combination of ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘The Gong Show,’ ” KJQ general manager Tom Greenleigh said. He added that he would have preferred to see the prize go to the hula-hooper wearing a nun’s habit.

“We’ve taken incredible heat on it,” Greenleigh said of the contest, which he said stirred considerable controversy and bad publicity from false Humane Society reports that the snake had been swallowed alive.

Pushing Legal Limits

Complaints go hand in hand with the zany competitions. Stations have run afoul of police, the National Organization for Women, the Federal Aviation Administration and even the Federal Reserve Board.

“You don’t go out intending to offend anybody,” said Doug Harris, director of creative services for Houston’s KLOL, which once dangled a 40-foot-long bra from its billboard to promote a breast-augmentation giveaway.

“You go out with the idea that you’re going to interest people and cause some excitement, because the American public--God bless ‘em--is jaded,” he said. “They’ve seen everything but live sex and human sacrifice.”

When KLOL offered $10,000 for the most outrageous display of its call letters, the winner planted a small plane bearing the logo into the side of a building he owned--then called the FAA to report a plane crash. He was investigated but not charged, Harris said, and the station gave him the cash, even though it disapproved of the hoax.

The Federal Reserve threatened to throw WYHY-FM’s chief accounting officer in jail for defacing American currency after the Nashville station filled a swimming pool with 100,000 dollar bills, then let 10 honey-coated listeners roll in the dough and keep whatever cash stuck to them.

Told to Launder Money

Unfortunately, $92,000 didn’t stick, and when the station tried to return the sweet leftovers, the Reserve demanded that the money be laundered--or else, promotions director Scott Baker recalled.

He said that about 20 staffers spent two days washing the $1 bills (in pillowcases), drying them (“gentle” cycle), ironing them (easy on the steam), and stacking them (face up)--all while the money was under armed guard.

WYHY also claims it was first to give away a breast augmentation. It enjoyed the storm of controversy enough to plot a new and even more questionable way to use its $250,000 contest budget.

“We’re thinking about giving away a mail-order bride--or groom,” operations manager Marc Chase said. “We’d let the winner go through the catalogue, pick one out; then we’d pay to bring them over and put them up in a hotel for a month while they get to know each other. . . . It is slavery, to a degree, I guess.”

For the last few years, the 2,000-member Assn. of Broadcast Promotion and Marketing Executives has included a “Most Outrageous Radio Contest” category in its Gold Medallion Awards.

Station KGBX in Springfield, Mo., has won the award twice for its annual “Fish Fling,” which tests how far listeners can hurl a frozen carp.

“If the object is to get listeners and create excitement in the community, some people will say it doesn’t matter how in the hell you do it,” said Jay Curtis, member services director of the Los Angeles-based association.

But Los Angeles media consultant Harvey Mednick, a 28-year veteran of the radio industry, believes it does matter, and that things have gone too far already.

Anything for Money?

“There have been cases where people have filed their teeth to points--literally disfigured themselves--to curry favor with a radio station,” Mednick said.

“I find it totally tasteless,” he said. “If a radio station challenges a listener to do something, then, realistically, they are responsible. Where does it go from here?

“Maybe where it stops is when, somewhere along the line, there is a genuine tragedy.”

Station officials say they often take out special insurance to cover listener stunts, demand that competitors sign waivers, consult with lawyers and sometimes even doctors as precautionary measures.

KOY-FM, Phoenix, awarded Fiesta Bowl tickets to a man who ate 30 jalapeno chili peppers in five minutes, and the morning show successfully dared a listener to walk into a convenience store, bark, ask for a can of dog food and then eat it. All for $95.

Last year, John Geiger, 33, and Jeff Howard, 23, won Super Bowl tickets from KLOS-FM by grilling an NFL (leather) football on a hibachi, cutting it into bite-sized pieces and eating it at 7 in the morning before a crowd of hooting strangers in the Los Angeles station’s parking lot.

Football With Sauce

“We got enough barbecue sauce on it so it didn’t taste too bad,” said Howard. “We had a good time doing it. We were going to eat the whole thing, but they stopped us about a third of the way through and said that’s enough. They were afraid we might keel over.”

The winners admitted that the two girls who wrestled a pig in a wading pool filled with spaghetti--complete with tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese--did have them worried. But, hey, so did the guy in a tuxedo and boxer shorts who belly-flopped 8 feet into a vat of orange gelatin topped with whipped cream.

Although there is no way to measure how much the contests improve ratings, stations report that, typically, 10% to 20% of their listeners enter them, and some consider them a vocation.

“There are professional contest enterers who are required, because of illness, age or family responsibilities, to stay at home during the day,” said Doug Harris. “It’s not uncommon for a 65-year-old grandma to win a rock ‘n’ roll contest.

“These people have speed-dialing on their phones and they keep three or four radios going in the home at the same time. They actually build their day around radio contests,” he said, adding that this is why many stations limit the number of prizes a single listener can win within a 30-day period.

A Flawed Second Try

Clyde Thompson was something of a pro. When KPBI asked what listeners would do for $10,000, the 40-year-old Denver security guard considered himself a shoo-in. After all, hadn’t he already won $20,000 from another station for dropping a car through his mobile home?

This time, Thompson decided to fill his house to the rafters with popcorn. Using industrial poppers, he spent the better part of a sleepless week last summer cooking up a 6,000-pound batch.

When the deadline arrived Thompson’s door had to be pried off, but alas, he had forgotten one little detail: Popcorn settles. He lost.

It took four tries for KPBI to get a winner out of more than 1,000 contenders. The station rejected the man who said he’d cut off his own leg for the cash, and it noticed that an awful lot of proposed entries involved Jell-O and nudity. The grand finale proved to be a splash. Well, maybe more of a splat:

Tom Shpakow dropped 105.9 watermelons 105.9 feet, from an old Montgomery Ward building through the open sunroof of his Mercedes-Benz.

Run on Name Changes

Meanwhile, rival Denver station Q103-FM had challenged its listeners to legally change their names to “The New Q103-FM.” When 49 of them took up the challenge, one irate judge barred Q cases from his courtroom because they were clogging the docket. Only the Q who produced the most documents bearing the new moniker collected the $10,000.

“Radio steroids,” is what Doug Harris calls the outlandish contests. “If you don’t have a strong programming department and strong on-air personalities to fall back on, it’s like shouting in the desert,” he said.

He worries about the precedents that are being set.

“With the new generation of pre-teens and teens growing up with home computers, 24-hour TV and 186 channels to choose from,” he said, “this is going to be a tough generation to dazzle.”

Times researcher Lisa Romaine also contributed to this story.