“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”  Most likely, one of the more memorable scenes in television history was when Arthur muttered those words following a terrible radio promotion on WKRP in Cincinnati.

It’s time to start prepping those Thanksgiving station events! We’ve all heard of pumpkin chucking. What about turkey launching?! ALA WKRP, we could try to send turkeys flying! Only this time they’ll be frozen and not crash landing like “bags of cement.”   This is an opportunity to have two companies involved and lots of sponsors. This promotion could be a sales team dream and turn into an annual event.

The Premise:

The station will obtain a fair amount of turkeys, all the same size and weight. The contestant will create an apparatus to launch the turkey. The turkey that goes the furthest, wins! Pretty simple, and the prize could be epic. The winner will not only receive a full Thanksgiving dinner, but also a new dining table!

Location: A field would be ideal but a parking lot would suffice. You could hold the contest in the parking lot of the store/company that donated the turkeys as well.

Sales: Clearly, you’d need to work with a grocery store or company that could donate the turkeys. Also, a restaurant or, again, store that would provide the dinner. Next, if it’s in the budget, a dining table would be an incredible incentive for this contest. That’s a piece of furniture that gets used a ton but maybe not at the top of the list of things to upgrade for a family.

Sponsorships for the event would also be available. The more you do this, the bigger it can get and become an experience where food trucks and vendors could participate. The first year might be a bit scaled down. Sponsorship packages could include website, social media and on-air mentions, as well as logos at the actual event. Go as big or small as you want.

This type of event needs to be promoted a month in advance. I know that would cross over any type of Halloween promotion, but the first year needs as much exposure as possible. After a few years, you could wait until the day after Halloween to start talking about it because listeners would already anticipate this happening.

This is just an outline of how to execute something like this. Take it and run with it! Get creative! Involve your community and encourage listeners to show up and cheer on their favorite turkey launcher!

Photo courtesy of FreePik