Real Pros Nonetheless
The shame about running a worldwide awards program is that we only get to give you the details on the winners, as we have on page 52 of this issue. Scads of other great programs never find it to print, but we will try to rectify that here by sharing some gems that fell just short in the World PRO Awards judging.
Out of the junkyard, into the mall. Only in promotion can creativity overcome lack of budget to scintillating effect. So it was with the Bathurst City Centre, a mall in Australia, which looked to build traffic in the dismal month of June. Playing on the car-craziness of the local populace, City Centre administrators went to a local auto graveyard, selected an old wreck, had it cubed, and put it on display in the mall. Ads invited folks to come by and guess the make, model, and year. Clues distributed in media kept people coming back to submit entries to win the grand prize of a new Holden Barina (that’s a car). Traffic increased 13 percent over the previous June, and store sales went up eight percent.
Snackin’ and Readin’. Let’s face it. Spending your life getting kids to eat more Pringles isn’t exactly doing God’s work. But promotion gave Britain’s Walkers Snacks a way to improve the quality of life for its young, chip-munching meal tickets. With the help of its agency, The Marketing Store, Walker distributed more than two billion Free Books Tokens on-pack and in newspapers that could be redeemed for 160 fiction, non-fiction, and reference titles. It tied in with the government’s National Year of Reading, gained endorsements from a number of national education associations, and won participation from 98 percent of all schools in the U.K. The cause-related appeal got daily coverage in the nation’s top-selling newspaper, The Sun, kids collected nearly two million free books, and Walkers increased its market share by six points.
Music to their ears. You know you’ve got a great contest on your hands when you can get a third of the nation to watch your contestants. That’s what South Korea’s Cheil Communications accomplished with Play Your Free Will, a music competition aimed to draw youth to the new Mvio fashion line. Young musicians were invited to perform their compositions at six regional competitions held on college campuses, with the ultimate winners promised a contract to appear in Mvio TV commercials. The events drew more than 75,000 people, who were given coupons to drive traffic to Mvio stores. The contest finals landed on national television, and the broadcast drew a 35 percent share. Cheil estimates put TV share of its target audience, however, at 70 percent.
It’s a nice day for white slavery. Okay, we’re being a little brutal here, but could you picture this prize offer being made in the U.S.? Win a Farmhand for a Fortnight – that was the dream Dow AgroSciences and the Euro RSCG agency floated to Australian farmers who entered a sweepstakes by completing a detailed questionnaire, thereby polishing the herbicide marketer’s database. The idea was conceptually brilliant: Farmers would never fill out questionnaires because they were too busy, so give them a worker for a spell to free up their time. A nifty sidelight of the offer mailing was a pair of work gloves that their “prize” could use while mending fences or digging out stumps. Dow got a phenomenal 26-percent response rate.
CD glom. Sometimes you can put together a great promotion with just what you have lying around headquarters. CDNow’s Connect to the Music Sweepstakes offered a grand prize of a trip for six to a Shania Twain concert, where winners would meet Shania. But it was the secondary prizes that proved irresistable to the company’s music loving targets: free music for life (a CD a month until Judgment Day), a CD player and a $2,500 CDNow shopping spree, 50 free CDs, and $200 shopping sprees bringing up the rear. The e-retailer got 126,000 unique entries, which included 8,000 first-time visitors to its site.
Holy Daffy Duck. Mexico’s leading salty snack company, Sabritas, used millions of bags as game mechanisms in a program that awarded 12 new cars, cash prizes, and free product. To flag the promotion, the company adorned its bags with highly noticeable film strips containing transparent areas that served as decoders for cards stashed inside the bags. The collectable gamepieces featured Looney Tunes characters on one side and an alphabet soup on the other that would reveal whether the purchaser was a winner or not when held under the strip. But, it was Sabrita’s subsequent use of the bag strip that reached for the promotional heavens. Stretching the limits of unauthorized endorsements, it festooned the device with Papal coats of arms to celebrate John Paul II’s visit to Mexico.
