When Covid hit five years ago (can you believe it’s been five years already?) many of us (not radio) had to start working from home. This was detrimental to radio due to a heavily decreased number of people in the car during morning and afternoon rush hour. Listening to your favorite morning show team wasn’t happening anymore when your commute consisted of the work force rolling out of bed and walking down the hall to their makeshift office at the kitchen table.

Now, offices are calling everyone back to work. Big corporations are making it mandatory employees return to the buildings. What does this mean for radio? You bet! More drive time listening!

Quantilope conducted a study looking at the past five years and found 85% of Americans are commuting to work now. That’s a vast difference from the 48% that were in their vehicles during prime listening hours the first year of the pandemic. This is huge for radio! Especially with the war on the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act, but that’s a whole other article.  Now, we need to concentrate on how to utilize this to our advantage.

With summer approaching, and more people in cars, what could you give away in the mornings and afternoons? Households are struggling while we are driving everywhere, whether it’s to work now, or being the personal chauffeur to our children in all the sports and camps. Gas cards are going to be like the legendary weapons in Fortnite (I’ve been playing way too much with my son.)

You can hand these out a few different ways…

  1. Have simple gas cards on hand. It would be great if you could find a locally owned gas station and use that one. When you hear the car horn, call in. Do you have a road rage story? Call in. There are lots of ways to fuel someone’s trip to camp this week.
  2. Another way is to simply post up at a gas station and pump $30 of gas in people’s cars. You can be like the olde time gas attendant! I would inform local police you’re doing this because I have seen gas stations become inundated with cars and it can get pretty chaotic.

Either way, you can’t go wrong with gas cards! Offer car washes and oil changes as well! More people commuting = more listeners. Let’s get those listeners to YOUR station!