Win Dancing on Ice Final Tickets with Macleans

Macleans have an on-pack promotion to win VIP tickets to the Dancing on Ice final, including travel and accommodation. Secondary prizes include city breaks, pamper days and magazine subscriptions. This is part of Macleans sponsorship of the show, and is part of GlaxoSmithKline’s attempt to ‘premiumise’ the Macleans brand. The sponsorship was handled by MediaCom, with creative by Grey London.

The promotion was housed at www.macleans.co.uk. It’s a good idea to host promotions within a main website, rather than a microsite, because of the SEO gains. Also, it was good to see that though Flash was being used, alternative mobile/SEO friendly content was available. Once at the home page though, this took a turn for the worse. I clicked on the ‘Enter now’ button to find a screen that a consumer would find very alarming. The web server hadn’t been configured correctly. To be presented with copy saying “This is probably not the site that you are looking for!” is far from ideal. After further analysis, I realised that this happened because I went to ‘macleans.co.uk’ rather than ‘www.macleans.co.uk’, which was the URL specified on the pack. Assuming most people will use the ‘www’ version, it’s not a critical issue, but there was still a basic server mis-configuration issue that could easily be sorted out by a system administrator. My preference is never to use the ‘www’ subdomain, but at the very least, the domain ‘macleans.co.uk’ should have been re-directed to ‘www.macleans.co.uk’.

I proceeded anyway, and was taken to a secure page where I was asked to enter my ‘B0’ code. There was no indication on the website what a ‘B0’ code was, or where it could be found, but I soon found it after careful reading and searching on the pack. An image on the website showing the exact location of the code would have been useful.

I entered my code, along with my name, postcode, email address and phone number. It was very confusing to be then told “Sorry, you’re not a winner, but you have been entered into the free draw to win tickets to the Dancing On Ice final”. As the main prize was tickets to the Dancing on Ice final, what was it that I wasn’t a winner of? I could only conclude that this was a copy error.