Big Cheese 107.9 Howl-O-Ween Pet Costume Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What's actually confirmed: two Halloweens, one closed window

Two years of confirmed history sit behind the Howl-O-Ween Pet Costume Contest: an edition in 2024, and the one that just closed, running October 17 through October 31, 2025. Wisconsin's Big Cheese 107.9 organizes it directly on its own Second Street account, wbcv-fm.secondstreetapp.com, broadcasting under a license held in Wausau, Wisconsin.

That last row deserves an honest read. The ballot page lists no category roster and no per-supporter limit; confirm on the live ballot each cycle, because a two-Halloween history is too brief for Big Cheese 107.9 to have locked either one in yet.

A photo vote, not a nominate-then-vote business ballot

Big Cheese 107.9's format here is a straight photo submission: owners upload a picture of their pet in costume, and the public votes on the entries directly. That is a different mechanic entirely from the nominate-then-vote structure Wisconsin's readers'-choice pages typically run, where a business first has to be nominated before a separate voting phase opens.

None of those three share voters, a set of judges, or a single results page with Big Cheese 107.9's pet-costume vote. Winning a costume-photo contest carries zero weight toward a business readers'-choice title or a weekly athlete honor, and mixing up the three programs is an easy way to send supporters to the wrong page entirely.

Wausau's own page, without a borrowed rulebook

Wausau is the city Big Cheese 107.9's own broadcast license names, and nothing on wbcv-fm.secondstreetapp.com extends the contest beyond that station's own listener footprint. No separate entry tiers by town, no age divisions for the pets, and no note about which zip codes count toward eligibility appear anywhere on the confirmed page.

The station's Second Street account runs plenty of other promotions alongside this one, mostly sweepstakes with their own separate rules and their own separate entry windows. None of those other promotions are part of the Howl-O-Ween contest, and none of their numbers or dates apply here.

A pet owner should read Big Cheese 107.9's coverage the same plain way the station states it: a Wausau-market photo vote, open to whoever the live entry form actually accepts. Anything past that scope is a question only the station's own entry form settles, since a two-edition contest simply has not published a wider rulebook yet.

What the confirmed page does spell out is the entry mechanism itself: a photo upload, followed by public voting, with the winner decided once the window closes on whatever schedule Big Cheese 107.9 sets for the next Halloween. Anything about breed, age, or type of pet an owner might enter isn't addressed on the current listing; confirm on the live ballot each cycle before assuming a pet qualifies.

Building support on a two-year-old contest

A contest only two Halloweens deep does not give an owner years of past champions to study, which makes acting inside the window already confirmed the smarter play. Line up real friends, family and neighbors who will click through to wbcv-fm.secondstreetapp.com and vote for the entry, then circle back to the same group again rather than making one post and calling it done.

Genuine, repeated outreach is what actually moves a small-market photo vote like this one, whatever a future vote cap ends up looking like. Automated or duplicate activity risks the whole entry, and that risk lands harder on a program only two years into its own history than it would on an older, better-established ballot. Buying votes online walks through what legitimate paid support can and cannot do for a photo-submission contest like this one, and is buying votes legal is worth reading before committing real time or budget to next year's entry.

None of that changes the basic shape of a costume-photo contest: a picture, an entry form, and a public vote, run once a year around Halloween by a single Wausau radio station rather than a statewide or national outlet. Treating it as small and station-specific, rather than as a scaled national sweepstakes, is the more accurate way to plan any push around it.