Beat This!
Whoever wins this one won’t need to look to Wall Street to make a killing ever again.
Thanks to an agreement with Lloyd’s of London, Flycast Communications, San Francisco, in conjunction with RealTime Media, Haverford, PA, will be tantalizing online investors with a Wall Street-themed contest featuring a $20 million grand prize.
RealTime claims to be the inventor of digital scratch-and-win technology and is a leading developer of interactive Web promos. Flycast is one of the largest sellers of online banner ads.
Called Beat the Street, the first game will kick off Friday, Nov. 15, with the chiming of the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Web surfers playing the contest will be asked to guess the nine digits of the New York Stock Exchange’s Friday closing volume. Get it right, and you instantly win $20,000. If you guess the closing nine numbers of the NYSE Volume and any five numbers of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, you win $200,000. If you guess the closing nine numbers of the NYSE Volume and the first five numbers of the Dow Jones Industrial average, you win $2 million. Guess the nine closing numbers of the NYSE Volume and the full six numbers of the Dow Jones Industrial, and you’ll have Lloyds of London cutting you a $20 million check.
The Beat the Street contest will be promoted on 15 million Web sites over the next nine months, “making it the most heavily promoted program in the history of the Internet,” Seidman claims. New games will start every week.
Because the odds against winning the grand prize are so high, there will be lots of lower prize levels, including daily giveaways and other goodies. There will also be a monthly sweepstakes that offers a grand prize of a Lincoln Navigator 4×4 or $50,000 in cash.
The promo is aimed at increasing traffic for online brokerage houses in general and boosting Flycast’s advertising base. RealTime is currently shopping the concept to possible co-sponsors that include E*Trade, Sheraton Hotels, Delta Vacations, Money magazine, L.L. Bean, and Charles Schwab. Chuck Seidman, RealTime president and ceo, says “We are very close to contracts.”
One of the promo’s aims is to drive up Flycast’s advertising placements. The company, which claims to register 300 million banner ad impressions a day on 500 Web sites, is touting its “rich-media” program, which detects the Web user’s browser and serves up a suitable market pitch. In the Beat the Street promo, Flycast is using the promo to sell all the banner ads that it can.
“What we’re really interested in is providing new advertising opportunities for our customers so that they can use their ad space to generate new revenue,” says Flycast vp marketing Lyn Chitow Oakes.
“Working with RealTime makes so much sense for us,” says Rick Thompson, Flycast vp of client services. “Using a real-time philosophy means we can create media buys on the fly. Thompson explains that by utilizing RealTime’s ability to track the daily volume of e-mail contest replies, Flycast will be provided with almost “instantaneous results and see what effect a buy is having in a day’s time.”
All about revenue To enter the contest, players set up free “prizes.com” accounts on the Internet. When contestants enter the contest site or the site of a co-sponsor, they will receive an e-mail that requests information. RealTime will share all e-mail harvestings with Flycast, and Seidman says the info will be invaluable to online brokers, personal financial advisors, online investment advisors, and Dow consumer-oriented product companies.
Because all the Web sites will be linked and able to access each other, the game can be played from any co-sponsored Web site. All contestants have to do is click on a participating sponsor site, scratch a few icons, and they become an instant winner.
“The promo takes advantage of the full potential of the Internet to generate revenue,” says Oakes.
Beat the Street will be launched at a still-to-be-decided Wall Street location with a traditional offline blowout that will include live music and T-shirt and hat giveaways, Seidman says. The campaign will also be heavily supported by TV ads and radio spots.
Once RealTime has the traffic going to the promo’s Web sites, it will then be able to change and adjust the contest theme. Seidman expects the contest-generated data to be, in his words, “awesome.”
Because of the links between the Web sites, “we’ll be able to find out extremely valuable demographic data about each contest participant including marital status, occupation, employment, household income, level of education,” he says.
Adds Oakes: “The data provides you with the ability to make it better the next time.”
It doesn’t get much better than 20 million samolians.
