WEBE 108 Billboard

As seen on I-91 in New Haven, Conn.:

Listen to WEBE 108 — “CT’s Best Music Variety” — and win $50,000, the billboard broadcasts in big letters. But take a closer look at the sign (if you can, while driving on a major highway) and …

… you’ll see much smaller print craftily inserted between “Listen & Win!” and “$50,000” that says: “Get Your Share of.” Which means that you cannot, in fact, listen and win $50,000. You can only listen and hope to snag an undisclosed “share of” $50,000. But it’s unlikely that most highway motorists who glance at the billboard pick up on the fine print and thus think — wrongly — that they can win $50,000 by tuning in to WEBE 108.

So what is this portion of $50K that WEBE 108 listeners can win? According to rules for the station’s “Thousand Dollar Song of the Day” contest, which is what the billboard is actually advertising, the most a lucky caller can win is $1,000. The prominent $50,000 figure on the billboard is what WEBE 108 says it will award in total to 50 different Connecticut residents during the contest, which started March 24 and runs through June 2.

The $50,000 is not, in other words, a single grand prize as the billboard’s larger letters suggest, but rather 50 individual $1,000 prizes.

TINA.org reached out to WEBE 108 for comment. The station has not responded.

Find more of our coverage on fine print here.