Do you remember checking under the cap of your pop bottle to see if you'd won?
Those contests and promotions did exactly what they were meant to do; they motivated you to open the bottle. But like mass media advertising, the system was flawed, in that it couldn't be accurately measured. Sody pop companies could tell you exactly how many lid liners were returned for prizes, but not how many were checked overall. I know this, because as a young convenience store employee, I would fill the slow time checking under the caps of the returned empties in hopes of winning a cash prize or a Dr. Pepper sweatband. Worse yet, they didn't know how many went unchecked; junked or recycled without a last minute intervention by a greedy gas jockey with dirty fingers.
Big soda pop has adapted though, and now has the wisdom to use the bottle caps to drive traffic to the web, where every unique contest enterer can be counted and graphed, thereby giving the advertiser a better idea of the reach and success of a promotion. Now, with this new "social web," technology has lowered the barriers to making user-generated content (can we rename that term, please? Srsly) a part of the DNA of contests. Photo contests, video submissions and countless other media-related entries (design your own pop bottle, anyone?) have taken the place of the "25 words or less on a plain sheet of paper" of old.
With this new territory comes new challenges as well. Not everyone has the know-how to submit a video to an online contest, but opting into a web form and casting a vote is easy enough, if the motivation is there. Ensuring that only humans have the ability to submit to these promotions presents another problem- if the system is gamed by bots, then the integrity of the promotion is comprimised.
Building a platform for these kinds of promotions that satisfies all those needs is the hard part. How does an advertiser best open themselves up to user-submitted media, online voting and marketing of its contests? What technologies should they use, and what kinds of steps are necessary for the legal and fraud prevention side? How will hosting be handled? Voting, judges or random draws? And how can you "get it on Facebook and the blogs?"
Strutta's upcoming feature-set release aims to answer all of those questions right out of the gate, and here's why we're confident that advertisers and marketers will embrace it:
(Because) There is a lot more value in having some level of lasting engagement with the people opting into your promotions, especially when they are willing to create media on your behalf in order to participate.
The finalists in a photo competition, for example, would make for a more interesting and deeper site visit experience for an entrant than having no reason to check back with a contest site at all. It's with this in mind I'm sure that companies started asking us about when Strutta would be made available for them to structure promotions on their own terms. We listened, and now that technology is just a few short weeks away from launching.
If you're curious about what's "under the hood" of this latest release, I'll explore that (and touch upon a few feature details) in an upcoming post. If you have questions you'd like to ask now, feel free to hit up the commnent form below or email me directly: jordan[at]strutta.com.
Image source: Pop bottles by Dawn-ny.
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