Paul Ford

Win A-Z of Prizes With Glorious!

Paul Ford — Sat, 05 May 2012 14:38:35 +0000

A straightforward promotion that could have been more explicit about the unusual prizes on the pack.

I’m not sure of this alphabet thing that Glorious! soups have going. It’s based around the idea that they’re part of the A-Z of global flavours but I can’t see what that would mean to a consumer. ‘Win A-Z of prizes’ also means nothing. If the purpose of an on-pack promotion is to attract the consumer in the supermarket and support the brand thematically, then who’s the target market for alphabets?

It makes more sense when you understand that their brand is based around bold, unexpected flavours but the on-pack communication doesn’t get that across.

The pack says to enter the promotion at www.gloriousfoods.co.uk/promotions so off I go! There are of course 26 prizes, ranging from an artisan baking class to ‘zombies all round’. The connection to ‘A-Z’ is pretty contrived though. I went for the 2-night stay in a lighthouse. Prize draws are held every week.

I had the Fragrant Thai Carrot by the way, and it really was glorious!

Win Cash With SureMen

Paul Ford — Sat, 05 May 2012 09:20:28 +0000

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.

Facebook is Not the New Web

Paul Ford — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:36:44 +0000

Think very carefully before hosting your strongest content on Facebook.

From a digital marketing perspective your website is your most important property. Despite the hype, Facebook is not killing websites. Brand pages, apps and profile pages are subsets of Facebook. And Facebook is a website on the World Wide Web. And the Web is a subset of the Internet. And the Internet is one of the many ways that human beings use to communicate with each other. One of the ways.

Facebook isn’t killing websites because Facebook is a website. As is Google and Twitter, all with their own business strategies and priorities. All prone to the same market forces and human error that all business is subject to.

So yes, be on Facebook. Use their free tools, huge audience and valuable metrics to build your brand and improve your consumer insights but do this secondarily to building your own website that holds your own content and over which you have complete control.

The idea that Facebook is turning into the ‘new web’ is just foolish, as if its intent is to create a simulacrum of an ever-morphing object.