There`s nothing like music to get Diane Belli`s mind off radio.
Every room in her suburban Hazel Park home has an AM/FM blaring. There`s even one in the shower. They`re on from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. some days. After a hard 15 hours of chasing contest prizes across the dial, ”I`m tired of listening to stations play the same thing over and over,” Belli says. ”I love to just put on an album and relax.”
Belli, 30, has plenty of auditory options: She has won 28 compact discs in radio station giveaways, three times that many dinners for two, a $3,000 diamond ring, $1,825.50, a Caribbean cruise, $1,000, a Florida vacation, concert tickets, Detroit Tiger tickets and best of all, an official, $300, Phil Collins-style black leather jacket from a Genesis tour.
In the four years since her first success-a pair of Wayne Newton concert tickets from a local station-Belli has collected about $17,000 in booty.
Radio contests, she says, are ”my part-time job.” They`re a full-time passion for dozens to hundreds of metro listeners-the number varies, depending on which radio executive does the estimating-who battle long odds and, in some cases, endure programming they abhor in the search for fortune and 15 seconds of fame.
”We have at least 50 regulars who win again and again,” says promotion assistant Mindy Markowitz of WOMC-FM, which keeps a computerized list of winners in a reasonably successful attempt to make sure no one exceeds the limit of one prize every 60 days. At WLLZ-FM, says marketing director Mike Isabella, ”It`s a running joke. We talk about it all the time.”
Inspired by Belli`s success, her sister won $10,000 last year from WLLZ, which also gave away a Corvette. Joan Hooper of Roseville won $10,000 from the late WDTX-FM a few years back, and another $1,000 from WHYT-FM. Her sister won a Ford Thunderbird. Sometime soon, someone will win $100,000 from WNIC.
”We`re in a time now where a lot of stations are trying whatever they can to get everybody`s attention,” says WNIC Program Director Jim Harper.
That station designed ”The Easiest Radio Contest Ever” to nullify the edge held by contest zealots with speed dialing devices and multiple phone lines. ”They have a tremendous advantage,” Harper says. ”We`re just trying to make it easy for everybody. If we call and ask your favorite radio station and you answer `WNIC,` you`ve got $1,000. If you know the last two songs we played, you`ve got it all.”
Hooper, 48, can live with that. What drove her up a wall-and into contest semi-retirement-was the move in the last few years toward the prefix 298 for most stations` contest phone numbers. Before, even as thousands of would-be contestants tied up a normal prefix and disrupted service for thousands of unwitting Bell customers, callers who couldn`t get through heard a busy signal.
Now, Hooper contends, they are just as likely to hear a ring, followed by a recording that says the lines are temporarily overtaxed. That deceives Hooper, who reflexively dials again at the sound of a busy signal, and those with so called ”demon dialers,” which automatically redial when a line is busy.
Harper uses a speed dialer, which spits out numbers two to three times faster than most people can dial them manually. Others use burst dialers, designed for telemarketers, which emits signals as quickly as phone company computers can decipher them.
For all that speed, however, nothing takes the place of patience. Habitual contestants may try for weeks to connect on a contest line. They monitor the radio religiously, switching stations to make sure no
opportunities go unnoticed.
”If you could bottle the feeling you have when you win, you would be a millionaire,” Belli says.
