Win Cash With SureMen

An over-concepted brand-engagement piece that is mobile-unfriendly, disappointing for the consumer and boring.

Sure has a promotion on its men’s anti-perspirant range to win £10 every 5 minutes. Everybody likes cash so why not? The Fix-a-Form multi-page label stuck on the pack says to go to suremen.co.uk to ‘start the adventure’. From there I clicked through to www.suremenadventure.com and then onto a game at www.suremenadventure.com/en/play-game/. I thought that three clicks was a lot to enter a promotion but it was going to get a whole lot worse.

I was then asked to choose between Earth, Wind, Fire and Water, not really knowing what the choice would mean. Then I was asked to choose between webcam and keyboard controls and advised that webcam was better, so I chose this. A Flash popup appeared asking for permission to use my webcam, which I accepted. I’d already guessed that this was going to be an augmented reality ‘experience’ and this was confirmed on the next screen as the instructions said to use my can of Sure as handlebars. The challenge was to get to the end of the game to redeem the code. I couldn’t get to the finishing line on this or on the water challenge so I gave up.

I’m sure it was fun to put this promotion together and I’m sure it looked good on paper, but it’s such a simplistic, boring game when everyone has Xboxes and Wiis that there was very little enjoyment or challenge in playing it. I mean seriously, only left and right controls? No acceleration? No braking? No opportunity to play against other consumers?

Leaving consumers disappointed and unable to redeem a promotional code when they bought the pack for that purpose is pretty bad. No mobile or iPad support either…

How this promotion should have been done is: a quick link to redeem the code (accessible by mobile of course) and then a ‘thank you’ page that invites the consumer to play the game. And the game should have been created at a much higher level.