A Calgary radio station burned $5,000 in cash as part of a promotion and now some Calgarians are fuming.
One woman has launched a petition to have the radio stations license yanked. Melanie Ykema put her petition online Friday and it has close to 300 signatures.
It all started with a promotion called “Bank it or Burn it”, AMP Radio invited listeners to vote on whether $5,000 should be destroyed, “Burn”, or handed off to a lucky Calgarian as a prize, “Bank”.
If the ‘Bank’ option was the victor, then one person who voted that way would be awarded the prize.
Voters who chose ‘Bank’ were asked to include what they would do with the money if they won.
If voters chose ‘Burn’, they the money would be sent to the incinerator, and that’s just what happened last week, with 54 percent of the roughly 100,000 respondents dooming the cash.
The stunt lit up on social media, saying that the money could have been used for much better purposes and questioning whether or not AMP’s stunt was even legal.
Ryan Lindsay, co-host of AMP Radio Calgary’s Ryan & Katie morning show, is defending the promotion, calling it a good marketing tool even though it was a bit heartbreaking when the results came out.
“Opening the envelope when it was handed to me on Friday morning was a heartbreaker,” said Lindsay. “We knew that the option was out there, but we never really thought that people would side with the burn side.”
Some long-time listeners say they were appalled to see the station go through with it.
“As a person who has had moments in my life where I literally had to scrape change and pennies to buy milk for my son it kind of hit a nerve,” said Candace Ortiz. “I was raised to respect the value of money and to appreciate the good that it can do.”
Ortiz says she won’t be listening anymore.
“I just can’t see myself listening to them anymore because I feel that as a listener, that’s my only recourse.”
Now, AMP Radio is putting $10,000 on the line.
“The city will have a chance to decide if the money goes into the pockets of one of the people that votes for bank or whether again it ends up being torched,” said Lindsay. “We’re a station of our word. We’re a station that has done some pretty ‘out there’ things but we’ve always gone through with it.”
“Every single media entity in the country, in the world, spends money on promotion,” explains Lindsay. “The $5,000 that we, over the course of two weeks, took and have now unfortunately burnt is a fraction of what almost any other entity in this city spends on their marketing costs alone and it’s garnered a lot of talk.”
“While we do feel horrible about the actual burning of the money, it has garnered a lot more publicity than we could have initially thought.”
Calgary Police say that it is not a criminal act to destroy bank notes and the laws under the Currency Act only apply to the destruction and defacement of coins.
