From The Contest Queen

I had an interesting conversation the other day with Johnny Lucas, the Editor-in-Chief of Driven Magazine. (Driven is a life-style publication targeted to affluent urban men. It is distributed to some Globe & Mail subscribers and in Air Canada airport lounges.)

They have chosen to run a contest on their website giving away ten pairs of Maui Jim sunglasses valued at $200 per pair. Entrants must answer a survey to gain an entry into the contest. Even though they would love to limit the entrants to their magazines target market, they follow Canadian promotional law and open the contest to all.

This is the marketer’s dilemma. How does a company ensure they reach their target market, while at the same time complying with proper marketing practices and regulations?

There are four solutions to this dilemma:

1. Hire a promotional marketing company. They have the expertise to run promotions properly and legally. This solution may not be for all as some smaller companies may not have the funds within their marketing budget to hire such a firm.
2. Run the promotion, analyse the information collected, then tailor the next promotion based on the data collected from the first. This solution involves a lot trial-and-error, plus time which the marketer may not have.
3. Run simple promotions promoting your sponsors and not worrying about if your target market had been reached. That may sound counterproductive, but they don’t know who their next customers may be. I can’t afford an expensive car today, but I might be able to tomorrow, so then I would be in their target demographic. Plus, they don’t know who I know. Word-of-mouth and social marketing have been steadily growing and I just may influence their next customer.
4. Do not run any promotions. (I don’t like this solution at all!)

I am interested to see which choice for future promotions Driven Magazine makes after their current contest is over.

I have set up my RSS reader to collect new postings from contest blogs (see my Blogroll on the right side of blog home page) and marketing blogs. I have noticed there is a glut of blogs running blog contests offering virtual prizes to enhance your blog, Internet business, website, etc. The prizes, although virtual, have dollar values attached to them, but are they worth it and would they really benefit you?

Take, for example, the Craziest Marketing Contest You’ve Ever Seen. They are giving away $13, 647 in prizes. Everything from a year of web-hosting, to online advertising to books and t-shirts. One way to gain entries into the contest is to subscribe to the blog’s emailing list and RSS feed. That’s a great way to get people to sign-up to your blog, but what’s the point of having people sign-up if they don’t care what you have to say and won’t read what you have written?

I think this is the virtual version of the paper customer list. When I started my career in sales and marketing 20 years ago as a junior sales rep., I remember being handed a database list of all their clients and told to call each and every one. Guess what? The 80/20 rule was alive and well. 80% of the companies listed were people that only bought from us once, had since left their position, didn’t remember who we were, etc. and the other 20% were our good customers.

I think these types contests are creating hundreds of virtual 80/20 customer lists. The websites and blogs can boast, “We have X number of people signed up.” Giving the false impression to their advertisers that all those connected to them are real customers. The real measure of success in any business, virtual or otherwise, is the profit margin, plain and simple.

So if you have a blog, website, or Internet business and you feel you could use some of the prizes listed, enter. If not, stick to entering good “old-fashioned” online sweepstakes.

(To learn more about RSS feeds and readers, checkout the Tips & Tricks section of The Winning EDGE Vol. 4 Issue 2.)

With the advent of TiVo and the PVR we are watching fewer and fewer commercials. Companies have to come up with new and creative ways to get their message across.

You can see the convergence of commercials and sweepstakes at FireBrand. All the promotions I checked out on this site were only open to the US.

RewardTV gives you the opportunity to earn points watching TV, answering trivia questions, then cashing the points in for sweepstakes, auctions or shopping sprees. Also only open to the US.

I thought the commercials running on FireBrand were pretty funny so it was interesting to hang around the site for awhile even though I couldn’t enter.