The funny thing about this promotion from Port Salut cheese is that by the time you’ve gone home, downloaded your coupon and gone back to the supermarket, you’ve probably already polished off the wine. The offer is 185g of Port Salut (priced £1.55 at Tesco) with every bottle of JP Chenet wine. The neck collar promotion says to claim my coupon at www.portsalut.co.uk. Continue reading ‘Free Port Salut Cheese with JP Chenet Wine’
I have a confession to make. I really enjoyed this bottle of Lambrini. It’s cherry flavoured fruit wine, which should make me run a mile, but I think I just like cherry flavoured drinks. It tastes a bit like Cherry Coke, which I love. This drink, and the promotion, is aimed squarely at young women though, neither of which is me. The prize is a personal shopping session with Patrick Swan, plus £2,000. Second prize is £1,000 to spend in Debenhams and runners up prizes are £250 shopping vouchers. For my chance to win I have to visit www.lambrini.co.uk and register. So off I go… Continue reading ‘Refresh Your Wardrobe with Lambrini’
As part of their run-up to the Olympics (Cadbury is the ‘official treat provider’, believe it or not), Wispa promises us ‘the chance to Win’ on the pack. It’s quite intriguing as there’s no mention of what we’ll win. I buy the chocolate anyway and I watch the scrum as my boys fight to eat it. Inside the pack it says ‘Visit www.spotsvstripes.com/Olympian and enter your unique Spots v Stripes code to play’. Continue reading ‘Wispa – Challenge an Olympian’
A text-only promotion for an impulse buy item like a chocolate bar is strategically perfect, and a ‘no purchase necessary’ mechanic couldn’t be easier for consumers. To enter, you text ‘WIN’ to 53371. You can enter up to 5 times from a single mobile phone, but only once a day. You have to go to squarelicious.co.uk to find out about the prizes.
This redirects you to http://www.kelloggs.co.uk/whatson/squarelicious/. This site could do with a critique as it gets the big things right (no Flash, SEO-friendly URLs, no microsites) but gets a few small things wrong (typos, forced use of ‘www’ in URL, images used instead of text). For example, considering this is a mobile entry, it’s a shame the site doesn’t render properly in a mobile browser. Enough raw information shows up on my Blackberry to let the user know what the prizes are: a great range of holidays that cover all tastes. Plus 100,000 money off vouchers redeemable via a digital barcode. Top marks to Kellogg’s for this promotion. I hadn’t tried this chocolate bar before by the way. It was delicious, but you can’t really go wrong with Rice Krispies and chocolate can you?
This promotion is not great. It starts with a pointless ‘Enter’ screen that sets the tone for the rest of the experience. If a consumer makes the decision to go to your site, you don’t present them with an obstacle.
After clicking ‘Enter’ I’m taken to a bizarre page that shows a forest with a flashing arrow and the text ‘Click and Drag’. Why would a user want to do this? Anyway, I do it and I soon discover that the ‘click and drag’ mechanism is just a contrived navigation tool taking me down a forest path.
This navigation system is replicated by an equally unusable and ugly spinning wheel containing the main links. You have to chase the wheel as it spins to try to click on something. The navigation options I’m presented with are: Farm Shop, Fair, My Place, Farm, Our Food and Competition. I’ve no idea why anyone would click on any of these links. ‘Farm Shop‘ isn’t a shop: it’s a product information section. ‘Fair‘ isn’t a fair: it’s a games area with a login requirement before you can play, but no indication of why a consumer would do it. There’s a button called ‘Play game’, followed not by a game, no, that would be too simple. It’s followed by an ugly overlay asking you to log in or register. When I do register, I’m not taken to my game. I have to click that again, and frustratingly I’m presented with the login overlay again! I patiently log in and still no game. I click on ‘play game’ for the third time and I get a ‘Conundrum Cracker’, with no conundrum in sight. It’s an anagram game on a fridge.
I abandon the game area and go to ‘Farm‘, which is actually a well-hidden recipes section. On to ‘My Place‘. This is an area where I can edit my profile and redeem the ‘Spud Shillings’ I’ve mysteriously somehow accrued. I click on ‘Redeem my Spud Shillings’ and instead of being told what I can redeem by shillings for, I’m taken to a very slow Catalogue section. I click on ‘HMV’ and I’m taken to page that lists vouchers for Waterstones, HMV and Paddy Power. I have 75 shillings , but a £10 HMV voucher is only a 1,000 shillings! Surely it won’t take long to achieve that? I begin to think that after all that clicking, all that poor design and user experience, I get to an interesting place. Now I have an incentive to collect these shillings, so I go back to the games area and play all the games. However, after I play them all, I still have 75 shillings…
So onto the competition. Users without Flash and JavaScript get through to a page I’m sure the developers didn’t want us to see [Update 12 Oct 2010: this page is fixed now]. It does look like browsers without JavaScript turned on can still complete the entry form, but it’s not clear whether they enter the competition as the screen just goes black. The ‘right’ way to do it is to click ‘Enter Competition’ in the Fair. I do this and I’m asked again for my personal details, despite being logged in! I enter them and I’m told that they’ll let me know soon if I’m the winner. I just wish I knew what I was winning.
I think the loyalty platform strategy underpinning this promotion is good, but the execution is clumsy and not thought through. The site feels like it was developed as a full Flash ‘experience’ site and then later split into chunks to help with linking and SEO.
It’s a shame because the McCain text promotions this summer were spot on: quick, simple and mobile-based. If this site is targeting busy Mums then it’s a long way off that goal.
Campo Viejo wine has an on-pack promotion to win a kitchen or some John Lewis vouchers.
The instructions say ‘Enter your Unique Code Online at www.campoviejowines.co.uk/win‘. The entry mechanic is easy enough: name, email, phone and postcode. Thankfully, none of that ‘re-enter your email’ stuff. Because it was all so easy I really didn’t mind answering the compulsory marketing questions that they bolted on. Unusually, the mechanic is an instant win, which I think adds a little excitement to it all. I lost, by the way 
If it was let down by anything, it was the inexplicable use of frames (with no scrollbars), which means that the promotion fails basic accessibility guidelines, including not being accessible to iPhone users.
Babybels were on offer, the kids were going back to school, so I threw a pack in my basket. That’s when I noticed the free space hopper offer: purchase 4 special packs and get a free Space Hopper! So of course I put 3 more packs in my basket. The instructions said to go to www.babybelspacehoppers.co.uk and key in the codes from each pack, so off I went. The website was in Flash, for very little purpose. Nothing loaded at all on the iPhone, just a blue gradation.
The application form was easy to find - I just clicked on ‘Claim your free Space Hopper’. The form fields were pre-populated with the title of the field. Although this isn’t in itself necessarily bad practice, the pre-population should be deleted when the user clicks on the field. In this case, the user was expected to select and delete it, and this is a big ask. There was a ‘please confirm your postal code’ field – the first time I’ve ever seen one of those. It’s best to collect the smallest amount of data possible: every extra field is another barrier for the consumer.
Anyway, I soon entered the data and the four codes, and I quickly received an email telling me that a Space Hopper was on its way to me.
The rest of the microsite is a bit more problematic. There’s a button for an ad that doesn’t exist yet (coming soon). There’s a link that offers you more information about the Space Hopper Games, but it just opens a Facebook events page. The user has to then select the correct event. Why not open the correct event immediately? Then there’s the ‘Like’ button on the home page. Contrary to what you would expect, this ‘Like’ button doesn’t let you become a Facebook fan of the site or brand. It simply links you through to the Facebook events page. Considering the amount of emphasis being placed on Facebook, you might think that Facebook was a big part of Babybel’s marketing strategy. But the page has only 287 fans, and there are only 2 days worth of posts from the Babybel Community Manager.
Looking forward to getting our Space Hopper though!
Marketing and advertising agencies are thinking about how to integrate Digital into their offering, without creating an internal silo. Agencies who already have a ‘Digital’ department are wondering how they can close them and get the whole agency thinking digitally.
Continue reading ‘Integrating Digital into Traditional Advertising and Marketing Agencies’
Iris have created a new campaign for Wonderbra that has some clever touches. I love the 3D billboard at Waterloo, surely referencing the nearby iMax cinema and drawing on the current trend for everything 3D. A 3D bra ad isn’t new, but putting it on a billboard is. There’s no URL on the billboard but a quick search soon gets you to the website, unless you’re outside and searching on your phone: the Wonderbra website isn’t mobile-compatible. Putting aside my objections to regional brand Facebook pages, the Wonderbra UK Facebook page is probably the best place to engage with the campaign. They’ve been quick to get the campaign onto YouTube too.
San Miguel had an on-pack promotion that promised a £10,000 garden makeover and party, plus secondary prizes of tapas books and glasses. I bought a four-pack today to enter the promotion but it wasn’t till I opened the pack that I discovered I was too late for the promotion. There was no indication of promotion timings at all on the front of the pack.
Nice looking website though.