Automatic Transgressions
THE PRIZE WAS a poster. One winner complained that his was ruined in the mail. When the fulfillment house pulled out his address to send a replacement, the problem became clear: This winner lived in Mexico. But this online game was only valid in the U.S. It seems the entrant chose “Delaware” from the drop-down menu on his entry form, but gave his street address and ZIP code in Mexico.
Online sweepstakes and games are cheaper and faster to run than traditional mail-in sweeps, but it’s risky to rely on a completely automated process. Invalid entries, duplicate winners and difficulty notifying winners can trip up an online sweeps or instant-win game. It’s more of an annoyance than a financial or legal burden. But these problems also dilute the brand-building power of a game.
“Promotions are about giving the brand the opportunity to have a meaningful interaction with consumers,” says ePrize COO Robb Lippitt. “We try to make sure consumers are engaging with the brand.”
Online sweeps have a higher ROI and response rate than traditional sweeps, says Marden-Kane Senior VP-General Manager Steve Caputo. “People sitting in front of their computers are more likely to enter than people standing in front of a tear pad.”
That’s fine — as long as they don’t enter too often. “Spoofers” can skew the odds of winning by setting up a false domain (call it XYZ.com) and using software to generate hundreds of thousands of false e-mail addresses from that domain. “When someone truly stuffs the ballot box, they do it several thousand times,” says Bill Carmody, chief marketing officer for San Francisco-based Seismicom. (All replies to a false domain are channeled into a single mailbox, so the spoofer only has to check one account to see if he’s won.)
It’s especially tricky for instant-win games, where winners find out right away whether they’ve won. Fulfillment expert Terry Cunningham was once the first to notice how many duplicate winners there were in his clients’ instant-win game — but only after winners had been notified, and prizes were expected. “Had the fulfillment process been automated [as entry and prize notification were], the discrepancy would likely not have been noticed until it was too late to correct the problem,” says Cunningham, president of Cottonwood Enterprises, Bozeman, MT. “Nothing beats the human eye working its way through that list.”
Automated promotions usually use e-mail addresses to weed out duplicate entries. But a promotion administrator who checks the entry log daily can see huge spikes in “unjustified entries” that aren’t related to a surge in media support for the sweeps, Carmody says. Then the agency can block any entries from that domain.
An administrator for Farmington Hills, MI-based ePrize once saw an instant-win game get 26 entries from the same household address in five minutes. It was one consumer, entering under all his neighbors’ names — but at his own address. “It took a person reading the actual address to see what was really happening,” Lippitt says.
Marden-Kane looks at the IP address that identifies the computer that sent an entry. (That data is invisible to consumers, but accompanies the data that entrants submit.) If administrators see a rash of entries from a single IP address, Marden-Kane can block all entries from that IP address or scrub out the multiple entries at the back end.
Garden City, NY-based Marden-Kane scrubs each list of sweeps entrants electronically to catch duplicate entries before winners are randomly drawn. That list of preliminary winners is manually checked, then sent to clients for approval. “They can’t change it; they can only approve it,” Caputo says. Winners are notified after the list has been scrutinized and approved.
“It sounds like it slows the process down, but it really doesn’t,” Caputo says. “These steps all came from the offline world.”
ePrize also makes what Lippitt calls “the human sanity check” before choosing winners, especially if high-value prizes are at stake. “We’ll have a human go through the database to make sure the parameters of entry have been met, and make sure we pick good winners.” Security is more stringent for bigger prizes. “I don’t want to give away a car to someone who entered 300 times when they were only supposed to enter once,” Lippitt says. Instant-win games with low-value prizes get less scrutiny: “There’s only so much human resource you can spend on it and have it make sense.”
This fall, ePrize created a new division, Fulfillment Services, to handle winner selection and notification, and promoted Jackie Trepanier to senior VP-fulfillment services. Fulfillment had been handled in-house, but having a formal division with senior management elevates the task.
Online sweeps have no printing costs, and e-mail notification is cheaper than mail. “A fraction of a penny per e-mail is quite a dramatic savings from any type of postage,” says Bob Hamman, president of Dallas-based SCA Promotions. Plus, it’s more efficient to capture information online than have office workers type in data from entrants’ hand-written cards.
Still, marketers must pay for online hosting, Web page construction, and enough servers to support site traffic. When Seismicom runs a sweeps for AOL, it needs “a ton of backend servers to support the heat of so many entries,” says Carmody, who recalls servers crashing under a rush of sweeps entries in the early days of the Internet.
Firewalls foil notification
Sometimes it’s tough to reach winners via e-mail, and even tougher to get winners to respond. E-mail filters often reject “You’re a winner” messages as spam. The messages that do get through are often ignored.
“There are so many scams online that winners’ first response is skepticism,” Cunningham says.
It once took Seismicom six months to award about 3,000 prizes. (Typical time: three to four months.) Now Seismicom doesn’t bother with e-mail; it sends a FedEx package for big prizes, certified mail for smaller prizes. “Consumers aren’t expecting an overnight package, so this tells them someone spent real money to get their attention,” Carmody says. Collecting street addresses from entrants makes it easier to fulfill prizes — and also provides another way to deter cheaters. “It’s easier to spoof an Internet domain and route it through China than to spoof a physical address and get a visit from our lawyers,” Carmody laughs.
Promotional auctions have been marred by spam filters, too: Top bidders may not get the message that they’ve won, then complain when prizes go to the second bidder.
A tailored prize pool helps target the right audience — memorabilia for sports fans, designer shoes for businesswomen. A generic prize (like cash) may bring more entries, but the wrong consumers.
Cunningham recalls one sweeps that awarded a collection of toys. One winner — a single young man — “declined the prize, saying, ‘I have no kids. What am I going to do with a bunch of toys?’” Cunningham recalls. “Some people enter so many sweeps, they don’t remember what they’ve entered.”
Sweeps hobbyists often keep a separate e-mail account to avoid spam at their primary e-mail address. “They assume winners are notified by mail or phone, so they don’t bother looking at their e-mail,” Cunningham says. “We end up doing third, fourth, fifth drawings to get a response from winners.” That makes fulfillment more expensive, because it can’t be done all at once.
Sweeps rules should be written to give winners 14 days to respond by e-mail, then allow marketers to notify non-respondents that they’re disqualified, and pick another winner. “We don’t abandon a potential winner unless the rules allow us to do so,” Caputo says.
Instant-win games, whose prize notification is built into the game play, are riskier than random-draw sweeps. A glitch that lets too many entrants win is generally covered by a standard errors and omissions insurance policy, but agencies prefer to avoid mistakes. Marden-Kane places more protection on game-serving engines to make sure there are only a set number of winners in the game-play queue “so it can’t get stuck to repeat or someone can’t recreate the winning graphic over and over,” Caputo says.
Games are first tested on a staff-only server, then a password-protected live server before going live with consumers.
“It’s about creating a fair environment — catching the cheats on behalf of the non-cheaters, so multiple winners don’t take the chance to win away from other entrants,” Cunningham says.
