Tom Anthony Personal Blog

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and some kids need your help. . .

My friend and client Joe Cipriano did a noble thing this Christmas Season… he and 30 other of the nation’s top voice over artists got together to create a unique reading of the traditional Christmas Poem ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.

Calling the project Prime Time Voices for Children, 100% of the proceeds benefit Chase Child Life Program at Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA. Joe also got help from Canadian Producer John Masecar, Killer Tracks – the L.A. based Production Music house, and yours truly.

I created en email marketing campaign to reach the US broadcast industry with the aim of offering the cut for airplay and call attention to the availability of the track to the public. Anyone who plunks down the 99 cents on iTunes (or outlets including CDBaby.com and Amazon.com) helps very sick children in need.

Starting with my partners at Constant Contact we sent out around four thousand emails to various broadcasters already in our database from previous campaigns for Joe Cipriano. But even at that number we were only reaching a small number of the nations Radio Programmers and Music Directors.

My challenge was to contact the largest number of broadcasters, and not send a bunch of duplicate emails to the same people we already reached through the previous campaign. I have a master list of opted in broadcasters from a company that specializes in just that market and went to work on cleaning the database.

I whittled down the master from around 100,000 to 17,000 – ran a program to eliminate the existing list and anyone who had opted out along the way. I came out with a final of 11,000 contacts. Next I needed to send the emails out quickly and although the list was legit we could not wait for Contact Contact’s vetting process. So I found software to do this all manually. Even at premium cable speed the email broadcast was scheduled over a three hour period.

It felt good personally to be able to help Prime Time Voices for Children, and it was gratifying professionally to be able to design, launch, and manage a national marketing campaign in just 48 hours. Whew! Happy Holidays! To see a copy of that email click here.

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