Nicole of Clemsford ON recently called me.  (Do you remember Nicole? I helped her win a car.)  She was very excited.  Her husband was selected to Boot For Loot.  It was a contest sponsored by the OLG (@olglotteries) to garner attention and sales for it’s Daily KENO lottery game.  The selected contestant would be flown to Toronto and during half-time during a Toronto FC game, they would get the opportunity to kick soccer balls to try to win up to $250,000.  I wasn’t able to watch the half-time show to see how they made out.  Then I got this email from Nicole:

Hi Carolyn,
I had to tell you what happened last Saturday at the “Boot for Loot” contest at the Toronto FC game.  My husband only got the 1^st ball in and won $1,000.  He was rushed by the announcer plus he could not see the clock behind him while he was kicking — only had 30 seconds for 4 balls.  Oh well … at least we got to see part of the game and won $1,000.

This contest was not arranged properly at all!  The promoter from MLS (@MLS_Insider) wanted us to stay in a locker room for 3 hours and not even let us see the first half of the game.  Thanks to the OLG representative, she convinced him to let us have a tour of the stadium and see the first 20 minutes of the game.  They didn’t even arrange for us to have designated seats.  They sent two taxis, non-air conditioned, to come and get us at 12:30 from our hotel where the OLG representative met us.  Taxi drivers did not even know quite where they were going.

To get us to Toronto, they were cheap about it as well.  We were suppose to fly over 150 km and we’re in Sudbury almost 450 km, they didn’t really want us to fly, so they gave us $500 in lieu. Airline tickets would have been almost $3,000.  Then they didn’t want to pay for parking our vehicle at the hotel, we also had to pay.

What an experience, with OLG promoting this, well they made it really difficult for anybody to get a soccer ball in a hockey net with a board at the bottom.  We have to say the Boot for Loot promotion really sucked!   I will send a letter out to OLG and MLS next week.
Nicole

I was flabbergasted.  Thankfully Nicole is an experienced contestor and would not let a poorly run promotion stop her from becoming a winner again.  However, this is a classic example of two companies that did no back-end promotional marketing.  The front-end marketing to get entrant and exposure and sales is run flawlessly, then it comes time to execute the prizing component and the ball is dropped.  Had Nicole been a first time entrant, I bet she would either stop entering all together or be very gun-shy when she did enter.

Marketers ask me all the time how do they get “regular” people (not contestors) to enter their contests.  One big myth marketers have to overcome is; the perception by the general public that contests are scams.  When they do not do back-end marketing and treat the winners poorly, they are only perpetuating their own myth, making it 1) harder to attract entrants to their next promotion and 2) harder for all their fellow marketers (who may be doing it right!).

Sadly, the MLS and the OLG are not the only companies dropping the ball:

Contest Glitch Puts Future Shop on Hot Seat

On Give-aways and Sponsors and Winners…