An Uncertain Award

Let’s face it, most sweepstakes prize structures are cut and dried: Super Bowl trip, sporty car, trip to Paris, wide screen TV, cash award. These are the eternal verities, and the fact is sweeps participants will never tire of having the chance to win awards like these.

But how do you handle a sweepstakes grand prize when there’s no guarantee that it will be rewarded within a reasonable time frame, if at all?

We faced this issue as we developed a sweeps for First USA Bank to introduce its latest affinity card, The X Prize Card. The X Prize Card has nothing to do with the X Files, X-rated movies, or Generation X. The card is a co-branded effort with The X Prize Foundation, a St. Louis-based group that’s offering a $10 million prize to the first team to design and test a reusable, commercially viable space craft for suborbital passenger travel.

We developed an automatic entry sweeps to generate acquisition and use of the card, which First USA target-mailed to groups like pilots, science teachers, and risk takers.

People gained entries into the sweeps each time they used the card. But the real kicker here is the grand prize: a chance to be one of the first passengers on an initial test flight of the space vehicle that wins the X Prize competition.

Here’s the hard part: Since the X Prize competition had no deadline, you couldn’t be certain a space vehicle would be ready. We had to ask if a winner would want to take the flight, and worry about travel insurance and how to handle prize transfer if the winner had a physical liability.

The biggest issue was meeting requirements for spelling out entry deadlines and judging periods. We decided on a ten-year time frame, using NASA’s Apollo program as our guide. So the rules said the space flight prize could be awarded up to ten years from the promo’s start in April 1998. As a safety valve we offered an optional prize of $100,000 cash, if no craft were developed or the winner preferred a payout.

To keep excitement high, we are conducting quarterly drawings with flight-related prizes, such as Apollo program memorabilia, trips in a zero gravity airplane, and telescopes.

With the space flight prize dangling out there like a big carrot, the promotion moves along as 16 different teams out in the hinterlands labor away on a vehicle that someday could take you from New York to Tokyo in under two hours.