This was a sitcom plot I saw a lot in the 90s, both Full House and The Simpsons had plots where a radio station was said to call random phone numbers (which were entirely random, nobody had actually signed up for the contest previously) and if the person on the opposite end of the phone call said “the magic words” they would win a prize.
This seems completely impractical, considering this relies on so many people actually listening to said station to automatically know the magic words right on the spot if chosen completely randomly and not just getting a bunch of very confused answers, but the $10,000 Fugitive Promotion was a benchmark bit for many radio stations in the 00s so anything is possible.
I am a former radio person, and yes, there were contests where radio stations would call random numbers from the phone book (and I suspect, sometimes just random numbers), and anyone who answered with “the phrase that pays” would be showered with a big cash prize. Just like the lottery - the idea was not to give away the big prize, it was to get everyone TALKING about how you were giving away the big prize.
The results were always pretty random. One time a call went through to the hall phone in my college dorm. Another time, I called a friend of mine, and her little sister answered the phone with “KSLQ plays the best music.” I couldn’t resist it, and in my best DJ voice boomed out, “YOU’VE JUST WON TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!” After she stopped screaming I shifted back to my regular voice and told her to put her sister on the phone.
I don’t know about radio stations but when I was growing up in Baltimore in the 60s and early 70s there was a local TV station that did this on a show called Dialing for Dollars. They ran a contest (might have been every weekday) when they would call random phone numbers and ask a question and you could win cash. They would actually cut up the white pages of the phone book and put slips into a basket or something to pick them from random, and then pick a ball out of a bucket to tell them “Sixth name from the top!” I think it was just before the local news.
And that was entirely the point. It was a gimmick to drive up ratings since you had to be watching the show to know the answer to the question.
I remember contests like that back in the day, both totally random and ones where they drew a number from a drum. You sent in a post card with your info on it, if they drew it and called and you answered with the phrase that pays, you won.
Too late to edit, but I should point out that back in the day, radio stations that ran contests like that actually had promotional departments that would advertise the contest around town on billboards, and sometimes even TV commercials. It wasn’t as if the contest was a complete secret.
The Mark and Brian radio show used to play a clip from one of those shows (I think it was “Million Dollar Movie” or somesuch) where the random person being called had to guess the amount of money being given away, and the poor host had a hell of a time just getting people to understand what was going on.
In days of old when knights were bold the local Top 40 station did something similar.
They would be out and about driving and when they spotted their radio station’s bumper sticker on a vehicle, they would get them to pull over and ask what is their favorite radio station. If the driver answered correctly, “WISM is Madison!” the driver won whatever was the going prize.
I think that lasted barely a week before the state shut them down. Since the process constitutes a lottery, the radio station did not have a lottery license (because at the time lotteries were illegal in the state), that was that.
To the OP, yes radio stations called random numbers to award prizes. And like any lottery system, the result for winners wasn’t always positive.
I worked EMS in the late 70s, and answered a frantic call from the exurbs of our small city. After a lot of problems finding the address, arrived to find a diabetic patient dead in the bedroom. His companion informed us he’d just won the local station’s random phone prize and gotten blind drunk to celebrate his newfound thousand dollars.
Check out CookingWithGas’s post (#5) for the Dialing For Dollars link. DFD was franchised to any station willing to pay, so it wasn’t on one particular network. As for Baltimore, they’ve been playing Musical Networks since Hector was a pup. I think DFD was on WMAR which at the time was CBS.
Yep. A whole slew of cities had Dialing for Dollars. Many times the phone book slips were in a tumbler and they would pick out of there. Howard and Rosemary Gernette did it here in Milwaukee. It was combined with news and light human interest stories. Usually at noon for an hour or two. Those memories really take me back!
In Green Bay in the '70s, one of the stations had a “Dialing for Dollars” segment during the “Afternoon Movie”; it was hosted by the father of a friend of mine. Though, I think that their version drew the number from postcards which viewers had sent in with their numbers (a variation on the format that a couple of previous posters have described), rather than using slips of paper from the phone book.
The show name in my post is a link to the Wikipedia page, which lists all of the cities. It started out as a Baltimore radio show (long before I was born).
This goes way back. In the 1948 Fred Allen had a very successful radio show, literally number one some weeks. ABC, then the weakest network, devised a ploy. It created a show called Stop the Music. They would play a song and then call some random number nationwide to ask if they knew the name. You had to listen to the show, of course; there was no way for anyone else to get you the info in time.
The gimmick worked astoundingly well, Allen’s ratings plummeted to the point where he desperately made an announcement on the show that if anyone missed a call because they were listening to his show, he would give them the money. Didn’t work. By the next year he had lost 3/4 of his audience and ended his show. He also had long-term health problems, but if he was still number one you can bet that never would have happened.
The radio station that we had on in the morning in the 1990s when I was a teenager did this with a $1 million prize. They had a big long build-up to it where they were going to call one phone number at a particular day and time advertised in advance, and if the callee answered and said “[Call sign], make me a millionaire”, they’d win. Anything else and no.
I remember listening to it live, and I pity the poor guy who answered the phone normally and then I’m sure had many people tell him how he missed out.
I assume that it worked pretty well as a promotion for the station, although if you think about it it’s pretty mean-spirited.
