SearchLove London | Iain Haywood, 'Promotional Marketing: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly'

PROMOTIONAL
MARKETING
The Good, The Bad, and The
Ugly
Iain Haywood
contact@competitionagency.com / @iainhaywood

Competitions, Giveaways
(Contests, Sweepstakes)
 Competition: skill-based participation
 Giveaway: non skill-based participation (surrender entry, prize draw)
 Good: maximising upside potential
 Bad: minimising down side risk exposure
 Ugly: what can result if that exposure is unchecked
Iain Haywood / contact@competitionagency.com / Searchlove 2014

What Should all Competition/Giveaway
Campaigns Include?
 Planning: what you want to achieve, how you’re going to do it
 Delivery: build or deployment on a chosen platform, like an app, minisite,
social platform
 Marketing and outreach: driving entrants, traffic, coverage
 Prizes: contra deals, partnerships, sourcing and acquisition, logistics and
fulfilment of those prizes
 Compliance and legal: national, international
 Measurement and data

3 Golden Rules
If you fall asleep, are abducted, or leave after hearing these, you’ll still
probably be OK

“
”
Rule 1:
There is more than one type of
entrant
Broadly speaking, there are two.
One is interested in winning your competition. They may also be interested in your
brand or vertical secondarily.
The other is interested in your brand and vertical primarily, and unless you’ve made a
major hash of things, they’re very likely to be interested in your competition also.

“
”
Rule 2:
Your competition is unlikely to
be a panacea
It could be, but it’s unlikely.
Be realistic. It’s not a silver bullet. Your company’s flagging windscreen wiper
sales are unlikely to be turned around by one competition on social media. Don’t
get seduced or dazzled by vanity metrics.

“
”
Rule 3:
Incentivisation fundamentally
changes the nature of intent
For the worse.
You are, in one way or another, changing why someone wants to do something.

RT and Follow! Like and Share!
THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE TO ME:

So what can you Run a Competition for?
(What is your Objective)
 Email opt-in
 Address/telephone opt-in
 Social media activity
 SEO
 Coverage
 User acquisition/retention/activity
 Basket value increase
 Sale of data

Distribute your ROI over Multiple
Objectives
Singular benefit Aggregate benefit
Spend
Opt-ins
Spend
Opt-ins
Social media
SEO/Coverage

SEO
URGH. Do I have to?

“
”
“...exchanging goods or services
for links; or sending someone a
“free” product in exchange for
them writing about it and
including a link...”
…Is definitely bad.
Now that disclaimer is out of the way…

3rd Party Competitions to Secure
Coverage
 Secure coverage you ordinarily wouldn’t be able to
 Appeal directly to your vertical, remembering rule 1
 Your provide prize or prizes
 Blog or site runs competition
 Incentive for other side is traffic/opt-in yield etc
 Given that incentive, expect them to be able to run it successfully
 Very straightforward

Some Tips:
 Treat it like a PR exercise, not a linkbuilding one
 Concentrate on quality, not quantity, do not mechanise
 Don’t overly specify terms over which the coverage is agreed (common sense)
 Don’t ever use any duplicated marketing copy
 We all know the tales of penalised brands who automate this stuff

Singular Objective?
 Not if you agree to duplicate the opt-in or social yield
 Easily negotiated
 Do make sure entrants know what they’re opting in to (Terms and Conditions)
 Opt-ins more likely to be the more valuable second vertical-interested
entrant (rule 1)

Opt-ins
All your email belong to us.

1st Party Competition to Gather Opt-in Data
(i.e. one you Run Yourself)
What you Want from Each Entrant:
 Land
 Look at your product or brand, watch a video (is the answer to your question
in the video?)
 Enter via opt-in
 Optionally follow you on social media, share it, and invite a friend, all of
which are incentivised with extra entries.
 You can make a lot of those conditional entries recurring, daily, or unlimited
for things like friend referral

Get a bit of a Flywheel Going:
Daily repeat
entry
Primary entry
– opt-in
Social
share
(daily)
Friend invite
(unlimited)

Some Tips:
 Host this on a landing page as close to your root domain as possible
(domain.com/competition), not a blog post, if you care about the SEO impact
 Microsites are useful if you are taking a risk, or don’t want the competition overly
associated with your core brand, if you’re running brand partnerships for example
 Think about your barrier to entry. You need to find a balance between quality and
quantity of entrant. How best to achieve a quality filter on landing- a question
can be answered only by product knowledge? Demographic survey
questions? Eligibility? A creative competition perhaps, where users submit
creative works, like a video, or an Instagram? (do note that whilst this engages
entrants on a very high level, it will decimate the entry count)
 Make sure your landing page focusses on the entry, but doesn’t waste an
opportunity to promote something! Weave it into your entry - video is a great
example, people much prefer watching a Youtube video for a product detail than
scanning text for an answer, and they will scan it.
 Make sure your entry mechanism is a solid technical entry, not a narrative one!

Don’t do this:
To enter our competition, do the following:
Simply email ipadcomp@windscreenwashers.com
Follow us on twitter @windscreenwashers
Fan us on FB
Leave a comment below
Share every day
Good luck LOL :)
 (Don’t use Comic Sans or emojis either)

Lack of Trust, Questions to Answer,
Blowback
 Highly unlikely a narrative entry from multiple sources will ever be recorded
and weighted properly
 Looks amateurish, and you’re inviting query or complaint.
 If you’re unable to demonstrate a fair and properly recorded draw, you’re
asking for trouble

Technical Entry – Build one!

Technical Entry

Praise be to the Out of the Box Solution

Try and use Technical Entry Wherever
Possible e.g. Twitter

Going “Viral”
V for Voting competition ends badly

Voting Competitions: Supremely
Attractive, Supremely Risky
 Often considered a shortcut to virality
 Where entrants canvass for votes, and those with the most votes win
 Very attractive because they promise leverage of the entrants’ will to
win/narcissism
 Canvassing for votes is a multiplier effect applied to the campaign
 Major risk it can turn sour

Brand launches expensive and engaging
voting competition
Entrants start canvassing for votes and the
flywheel starts up
As competition between them becomes
more fierce, techniques like vote
exchanges, scripting or other exploitation
for votes comes along, or votes are simply
bought. There start to be complaints
Brand does nothing
Gets away with it
Gets called out -> blowback
Brand tries to fix things
Ban offending entrants and votes.
Technically possible? Logs? Accounting for
illicit manual votes?
Unfair -> blowback
Changes winner selection to judging
method
Unfair -> blowback
Ends competition prematurely Unfair -> blowback

Why Voting Competitions are a Bad Idea
 With the exception of you “getting away with it”, which is possible, there’s
no situation where the brand comes out of it well
 Greatest risk of potential mess up
 Even if technical fraud is mitigated, manual/bought fraud is pervasive
 A large number of ASA adjudications concern complaints arising from the
mishandling of voting competitions
 Competition a victim of its own success, the bigger it gets, the more likely it
will succumb to exploitation
 Harms future campaign prospects, loss of trust
 Quite possible that brands themselves “cheat” in order to preference one
winner over another

Marketing
Build it and they may not necessarily come

Marketing
 Best way to sustain “base-level” or background marketing is to build it in
 You can even build in coverage as an entry mechanic
 Blogging competitions
 Track using a tracking pixel/script (may not work on 3rd party hosted blogs
like Blogger or Wordpress because of javascript)
 Track using inbound referral (not infallible, best to double up with email
confirmation)

Marketing
 Don’t forget ad spend!
 Display advertising can complement below the line activity well

Quick Wins
 Competition communities (both sites and social communities)
 Examples include Money Saving Expert, HotUKDeals, The Prize Finder,
Competition Hunter
 Forums in particular may have a “no self promotion” policy so bear this in
mind pre-approach
 Will provide a consistent battery of entrants, links and signals
 Competition bloggers
 Influencers

High Value Targets – how do I get X
to Write about my Competition?
V for vertical

Ticking the Right Boxes
Both have:
 A “transformative” prize. Both of them
offer a large cash prize, and serious
career advancement. That’s instantly
newsworthy within the vertical.
 Both of them have very famous judges,
there’s always BAFTA bods and very
famous credits.
 Niche appeal. There’s a concentration of
attention, and less competition for
coverage in the vertical itself. A totally
mass market consumer competition
pitching to a newspaper has everything to
compete against.

Some Tips
 Transformative/life changing prize - the most extreme example of these in recent
years was the Best Job in The World campaign in 2009, run by Tourism
Queensland. Still replicated to this day.
 Famous judges. Influencers in your vertical with big social media footprints, or
who may be journalists, or boost your cred in some way. It’s usually considered as
an honour to be selected as a judge, and so you can reasonably expect they’ll be
talking about it a lot.
 Treat the PR as old school, don’t just pitch them, give journalists something, and
make them feel important:
Exclusive access or content, an interview?
Can they preview or try the prize?
Invite them to breakfast/lunch/dinner/a campaign launch - you wouldn’t
believe how far this gets you. Journalists still love free food/booze.

The Insanity Pitch
 Sure, go for the stupidest/most insane competition ever
 Great for blog coverage and mainstream coverage from free papers (Metro,
Evening Standard etc)
 Remember that entries will be generally useless

Ticking the Right Boxes (and Getting a
Head Start)
Both have:
 A “transformative” prize. Both of them
offer a large cash prize, and serious
career advancement. That’s instantly
newsworthy within the vertical.
 Both of them have very famous judges,
there’s always BAFTA bods and very
famous credits.
 Niche appeal. There’s a concentration of
attention, and less competition for
coverage in the vertical itself. A totally
mass market consumer competition
pitching to a newspaper has everything to
compete against.
 The above + institutional partners = highly
credible

Jumpstarting Credibility and
Guaranteeing Coverage:
Getting Yourself a Media Partner
But how to woo one?

Remember:
They’ll likely owe you some
coverage, but you will likely owe
them some kind of exclusivity (if
it’s a newspaper; exclusive
newspaper coverage, if a
magazine; similar etc), so make
sure you punch to or above your
weight or you may throttle your
potential coverage.

Compliance
The really dry bit

National/International – is it Worth it
from a Compliance Point of View?
 Consider the burden of compliance against the benefit of running a campaign
in a particular country
 UK has generally a light touch approach
 Contravention can mean fines
 If in doubt, explicitly exclude countries/territories (e.g. Quebec in Canada,
Rhode Island in America) when drafting terms and conditions, or positively
restrict (i.e. competition open only in United Kingdom and Australia)

International Rules and Regs can Vary
Significantly by Country (and by territory)
 Want to run something in Italy? Then get familiar with the Ministry of Productive Assets and
Economic Development, and the Chamber of Commerce, submitting your rules and details of the
competition for review, notifying of the start date, and an official must be involved in the picking of
a winner.
 France has a similar set of requirements where rules must be publicly registered with a notary and
have a bailiff involved with the picking of a winner. Entrants can also claim reimbursement of any
entry costs (so don’t have a postal or text option!)
 In Brazil, you’re not allowed to give away cash. Other countries have restrictions on the amount of
cash you can give away, like Taiwan, which has a formula based on the average wage. Mexico has a
ceiling amount before the government must get involved.
 Many countries don’t allow giveaways or sweepstakes (that is to say, no-skill participation) at all,
including Sweden, Ireland and in Quebec, Canada (if you’re running a sweepstake or giveaway in
Canada, make sure it’s void in Quebec for example). This can be nominally circumvented by using
an “idiot question”, like “what’s the 5th letter of the alphabet?”
 Even in the United States, some states like Rhode Island require registration of a contest
 Don’t forget international rules relating to data protection. In Italy, all entrant data needs to be
conveniently stored on Italian servers, and in the USA, under COPPA (Children's Online Privacy
Protection Act) you can’t take or retain any details of anyone under the age of 13, for example.

For the UK, you’ll Need to Know:
 Data: Data Protection Act
 Competition/promotion: British Code of Advertising, Sale Promotion and
Direct Marketing, or “CAP code”
 TV: BCAP TV
 Radio: Radio Advertising Standards Code
 Premium phone lines: Phonepay Plus

What you need from the CAP Code:
Section 8 (It’s pretty easily digestible)
 S8 is small but perfectly formed, and is very straightforward
 Alongside the general requirements that all advertising must be legal, decent, honest, and truthful, Section 8 specifically addresses some requirements for sales promotions - primarily that they need
to be fair.
 A few notable elements (do consult the doc in full):
 how to participate, explain free entry route(s)
 the start date/end date
 age restrictions if promoting alcohol
 any proof of purchase requirements
 Nature/number of prizes, if any, cash exchange value
 any geographical, personal or technological restrictions eg location, age
 how and when winner(s) will be notified,
 how and when the results will be announced
 winners' names must be published or available on request
 criteria for judging, appointment of an independent judge (name must be available on request)
 who will own the copyright in the competition entries
 intention to use winners in any post promotion publicity

Terms and Conditions:
ALWAYS
 Participants must be able to retain this information or have easy access to it
throughout the promotion.
A few additional tips regarding Terms and Conditions:
 Don’t ever not have them. If running a competition on Twitter or Facebook, link
them!
 Don’t give anyone an opportunity to complain about anything, don’t be vague
 Don’t ever change them. Don’t change the nature of your entry method, extend
your end date to capture more entrants etc
 Don’t be afraid of explicitly disclaiming things
 Explicitly prohibit cheating, duplicate or 3rd party entries, technical
exploitation/scripting, buying of votes, other types of fraud (people will cheat,
and it can bring your campaign down)

Platform Compliance
 Social networks have specific Terms of Service to do with promotional activity
 Facebook has massively liberalised how users can interact with the platform
for competitions, no longer just a “like gate” available
 Google+ explicitly prohibits the platform from being used in competitions
 Never heard of any infraction resulting in removal (low risk)

Consequences of Unchecked Risks
TL;DR – Bad publicity

The Three Main Consequences

Cheating/Fraud/Exploitation
Automated Entry Services
Come in two basic flavours:
1/ A script that floods your entry database with garbage
data.
2/ The other type is a paid service that real people sign up
to for a fee, which auto enters into regular or well known
competitions. Now, whilst those entries haven’t read about
your product, watched a video, or told their friends about
the competition, those details are legitimate, and
competitions if regular or well known can receive maybe
tens of thousands of legitimate opt ins.
To mitigate:
Disclaim it in terms and conditions, use things like
randomised quizzes or captchas or restrict entries by IP (will
inevitably throw up some false positives)
Scripting/exchange/buying
(typically for votes)
In voting competitions, for most systems, it’s not hard to
game them via a script. Votes can also be bought via
mechanical turk systems and places like Fiverr, and you can
find plenty of horse trading exchange groups on Facebook
and in forums.
To mitigate:
Your best bet here is just not to have a voting competition,
but if you do want one, disclaim in terms and conditions,
make sure your logging is top notch, filter and restrict by IP
(false positives), but manual fraud will be very difficult to
police.
Cheating (old school)
So many competitions are so simple that cheating isn’t
necessary. Do expect people to share the answer, in the
grand scheme of things, it’s really not the end of the
world. People do regularly cheat in creative competitions -
particularly photo or narrative competitions.
To mitigate:
Disclaim in terms and conditions. The best way of filtering
out any fraudulent entries is to use reverse searches - for
example TinEye for images and Copyscape for text.

The ASA
 Complaints can be made to the ASA regarding competitions, and they
regularly are. The ASA is a self-regulatory body for the ad industry, is non-statutory,
and cannot enforce legislation.
 It is not the same as the office of fair trading, although it can however in
extremis refer cases to the Office of Fair Trading.
 The biggest practical weapon in its arsenal is public adjudication, upholding a
complaint made, which means bad PR. What will its adjudication be? That a
promotion was deemed to be unfair, or in breach of the cap code, it may
make recommendations as to how future promotions be conducted in a
different way.

It all Adds up to Bad PR
 A soured competition can be a reputational grenade, but it’s unlikely to kill
you
 How does this bad PR manifest itself? 90% is blogging
 Ad industry sites regularly cover ASA stuff, that’s important for ASA to carry
weight
 Also legal blogs, law firms, marketing agencies and of course consumers.
 People will make hay out of it, potentially your competitors too.
 Could argue it’s an unorthodox linkbuilding strategy, but rather out of the
Kamikaze school of SEO

Any Resources Gladly Provided on Request –
contact@competitionagency.com
 Competition communities/blogs (like Money Saving Expert, HotUKdeals)
 Competition draw apps services (like Twitterdraw and Competwition)
 Complete competition SaaS (like Rafflecopter and Punchtab)
 Any qs off the record
 You can follow me on Twitter @iainhaywood (NB: egregiously odd tweeting)

SearchLove London | Iain Haywood, 'Promotional Marketing: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly'

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SearchLove London | Iain Haywood, 'Promotional Marketing: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly'