I'm sitting this morning at a local restaurant in a suburb of Baltimore. The time is 9:00 a.m. and the diner is three quarters full. It shouldn't be. At this time of day the geriatric crowd should be the only ones still eating -- everyone else is at work, keeping the households going, or in school. My excuse for a late breakfast is my car is in the shop across the street. Why is this place so busy?
The Answer: A local morning radio talk show host has taken up a corner booth (actually a couple of booths -- one for her and her guests, and one for the broadcasting equipment and the people to operate it). She's broadcasting her morning show live from the diner. Her first announcement on the air is where she is, what she's doing, and how to get here and join her. I can see cars pulling into the lot just to see the show in person.
Prime time for breakfast at this diner is 6 a.m. - 8:30 a.m. After that it's generally dead until noon. The radio broadcast is from 9 til noon, clearing out just in time for lunch.
Based on an average ticket of $6 each for breakfast and 100 additional people who would not have normally stopped in, we're talking $600 in additional receipts. Throw in the constant publicity on the radio (in between talk-show topics) of the dinner menu items, and they're going to bring in hundreds more people over the next few days. The potential business from this event is phenomenal.
I'm going to give a rough guess that the restaurant paid less than $1000 for this deal, if anything at all. They're probably a regular advertiser on the radio station to begin with, so this may have been a "thank-you-for-advertising-with-us" trade. Or they may have offered free food for the station, or certificates for free meals as give-away promotions for the station to offer to listeners.
The one drawback to hosting a radio show that I can see is your tables aren't going to turn as often during the show. People will sit for the entire show and refuse to leave, blocking tables for people waiting to come in. The upside of this is the people sitting down will head home and each will brag to at least 100 people about their exciting morning. So in this case the benefits far outweigh the drawback.
While best suited to restaurants, taverns, and diners, a radio remote broadcast will draw customers to virtually any location. Imagine a broadcast from a bowling alley, a large bookstore, an ice skating rink, the center of a shopping mall, a miniature golf course, a car dealership, or any location that's big enough to hold a group of people.
Your objective with a remote radio broadcast is to get traffic to your location. Assuming you've picked a radio station that people actually listen to, you're going to increase walk-in traffic that would have normally just driven by.
Be sure to link up with a radio station that fits your expected client demographics. Don't pick a geriatric-oriented radio station to promote a nightclub for twenty-somethings. From what I can tell, this diner's clientele is older and mid-range income level. The radio station they've hooked up with fits those demographics.