I love June which is known for it’s long days, gardens that are in bloom and the official kick-off to summer. It’s also a very busy month with graduations, weddings and Father’s Day which is this Sunday, June 16. I personally have already been to one wedding and know of several others planned for this month. Marketers are also busy this month with promoting their products and services around the seasonal events.
We haven’t seen much promotions from our client’s around Father’s Day this year, but this one caught my attention as pretty unique. Kraft Heinz’s Bagel Bites has teamed up again with pro skateboarder Tony Hawk, who is a father of six, with a social media campaign that they have named the “Rad Dad Squad”. Apparently back in 2002, Hawk appeared in a Bagel Bites ad and critics called him “Bagel Boy,” in which Hawk defended himself stating that he really was a consumer of the snack.
So a faux-interview-format teaser video was posted on Hawk’s Instagram and YouTube channels to launch this new campaign, which is titled “Tony Hawk sells out. Again.”
The next part of the campaign announces the #RadDadSquad Sweepstakes which is shown in the second video below. Here Hawk is engaging in goofy activities with his own kids. The Sweepstakes invites people to post a photo or video showing a “Rad Dad” sharing a fun moment with their kids either on Instagram or Twitter. They also need to include the #RadDadSquad and #Sweepstakes hashtags in the caption.
There are three entry period in the Sweepstakes. The first drawing will be held on Father’s Day, June 16. The next drawing on June 21 and the last drawing June 24. All posts need to be completed by June 23. There will be a one Grand Prize winner for each entry period. The three winning dads will each get to take up to three guests on a trip to Vista, California to meet with Tony Hawk on August 3, 2019.
At least two of the guests must be minors, so presumably the winner will take their kids. The trip prize package includes round trip air transportation for up to four people, two nights’ hotel accommodations, a $250 allowance for a rental car, $250 spending money, a $2,000 check that may be used to assist with tax liability and a three hour party at Tony Hawk’s skate ramp including lunch and skate demo by Tony Hawk and his team of skaters. Winners must agree to be filmed during the Tony Hawk event.
You can visit the RadDadSquad website to see some of the of the Rad Dad moves Tony Hawk does with his kids and some of the videos that have been posted for the Sweepstakes.
Last weekend the road to SuperBowl 50 continued with four great playoff games that left us with four teams in the running. All four where the home teams, unlike the weekend before that made history when all four away teams won.
The Green Bay Packers almost got away with an upset when Aaron Rodgers had two Hail Mary’s as the 4th quarter expired to tie the game and send it to overtime. However, the Cardinals got the ball first, even over a coin flip controversy, and ran the ball down the field to score a touchdown and end the game.
So now we have the New England Patriots heading to Denver to play the Bronco’s, the AFC’s #1 seed. This is the game of the quarterbacks with Brady vs. Manning, and many speculating could be the last time they will ever face each other again. On the NFC side we have the Arizona Cardinals heading to Carolina to play the Panthers, the almost undefeated team on the season (16-1). I’m looking forward to watching some good football this Sunday.
Besides the Dorito’s Crash the Super Bowl Contest, the parent company, PepsiCo, is also returning with its Game Day Grub Match for Super Bowl 50. This contest challenges student chefs to cook up the greatest dish for the “Greatest Day In Football”. This unique cooking competition features students from The Culinary Institute of America, right here in New York state, competing to create the ultimate football food. Part of the requirements is that each dish must incorporate PepsiCo food and beverage products as ingredients.
In addition to the student competition, PepsiCo is giving the general public their chance to share their best dish. This contest just started accepting submissions on January 14 and will continue till game day, February 7. Everyone is invited to submit their own game day dish to Instagram, Twitter of Pinterest using the hashtag #gamedaygrubentry. They need to upload an image of their dish along with a copy description or a link to the recipe. A panel of judges will review all the eligible submission and choose winners based on the following criteria: Presentation of dish, Use of at least 2 PepsiCo products in recipe and Creative use of product.
The Grand Prize winner will receive $1,500 plus a PepsiCo party pack that includes a mix of PepsiCo food and beverage products, as well as a signed cookbook from Anne Burrell, and a Wilson Super Bowl 50 Football. Two Runner-up prizes with each receive $500 as well as a PepsiCo party pack the signed cookbook and a Wilson Super Bowl 50 Football.
PepsiCo’s main objective with this promotion is to increase awareness of their entire food and beverage portfolio that includes includes 22 brands such as Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Quaker and Tropicana. A list of all their products in featured here on the contest website.
“Great food and football are captivating millions of fans gearing up for Super Bowl 50 — and Game Day Grub Match brings these two things together in a way only PepsiCo can,” said PepsiCo Executive Chef Jody Denton. “Our snacks and beverages have been staples of Super Bowl parties for five decades, and the student chefs from the Culinary Institute of America took game day food to a whole new level.”
Back to the student’s competition, it came down to three teams and after much deliberation among the judges, Claire, Yejin and Joel were selected as the Game Day Grub Match champions for their Doritos Dim Sum Joh. Each of them earned a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, tickets to Super Bowl 50 and a $5,000 scholarship. Congrats to all these amazing young chefs.
You can visit the Game Day Grub Match website to see the student recipes that were submitted to help inspire you to create you own game day dish for Super Bowl 50. There are also many photos and recipes on the site that have already been submitted by the general public. The image above is one of the first submissions. They make you hungry just looking at them all.
Today’s post was written by Alex Ditty, Client Operations Manager at SEEN. You can read more posts written by Alex on their blog.
Contests and sweepstakes are smart and effective ways to engage your community and promote your brand. At SEEN, there have been hundreds of brands across a wide variety of industries who have used our campaign management platform for these types of promotions.
Because of this experience, we’re commonly asked whether it’s better to have participants enter simply by sharing with a hashtag or if the brand should also include an entry form for participants to complete. In short, our answer is always, “it depends”. It depends on the goals of the contest and what you’re hoping to gain. This is a topic that has been written about on this blog before, and we’ll go into more detail on the differences and benefits of running a contest or sweepstakes with hashtag sharing versus requiring completion of an entry form to help you plan your next social media campaign.
Entry FormBenefits
Requiring completion of an entry form gives you the ability to gain more information from the participants. This benefits you in three important ways. The first is simply the ability to get in touch with the participants in order to send the winners their prizes. When you’re unable to collect contact information you’re limited to social messaging to try and get in touch with the winners, which may not yield positive results.
Along with contacting the winners, the second benefit is that you can also gain the ability to contact all of the participants in future marketing campaigns. When they provide you with contact information and opt into your email marketing, then you’re able to use the promotion as a lead generation tool. Additionally, this process can help unify your customer’s identities by creating a link between their email address and social profiles.
The third and often the most overlooked benefit is the opportunity to gain important learning. With an entry form you can have your participants share important data with you such as location and demographic information. This new touch point can help impact other marketing initiatives by gaining a better understanding of who your customers are and how you can connect with them.
With the Registration Tool in the SEEN Campaign Manager, participants verify their social accounts and enter their contact information to confirm their participation in the campaign and to link their social and email identities to your marketing.
Entry Form Drawbacks
Though you’re gaining more useful information with an entry form, you’re also slightly complicating the entry process for your participants. By adding in this additional step for participation, you may limit the involvement from your community. It is possible for this to act as a filtering mechanism to determine who is really interested in your brand, however it may also restrict the overall number of people that participate. Before implementing a mandatory entry form, consider the potential barrier that this can create and how it may affect participation.
Hashtag Sharing Benefits When you’re launching a social media sweepstakes or contest, an easy way that you can get people involved is simply by encouraging them to share with a promotion-specific hashtag. This will most often result in higher participation numbers than those that require an entry form. This ease of entry is one of the biggest benefits, and the additional social sharing that the hashtag provides can also help you increase the reach of the promotion. Participation is likely to be the most important success metric in your campaign and hashtag entries can give you confidence that you’ll have a high participation rate with its simplicity to enter.
Hashtag Sharing Drawbacks
Hashtag entry will gain you a lot more campaign entries and likely lead to higher participation rates, however ir misses out on the vital learning and marketing benefits that entry forms provide. When you simplify the entry process, you take away opportunities for the participants to also share vital information with you that can strengthen your relationship with them. When planning a contest or sweepstakes based solely on hashtag sharing, ask yourself if participation or data collection is the more important success metric for your goals.
So, which of these entry types is best for you next promotion? Well, that depends on your marketing goals. The first step is to determine your goals are and with those in mind, you can properly implement either of these participation options. Some brands don’t have the luxury of building entry forms for each of their contests, which makes hashtag entry the only option. Fortunately, there are tools like the SEEN Campaign Manager where you can easily implement either or both of these options with no development work.
Understanding the benefits and drawbacks of each participation option, we’ve designed our campaigns to simplify the process for both the social media managers and the participants. For the manager, launching a hashtag based promotion and turning on custom entry forms are very easily done with a click of a button. And when registration forms are implemented, participants are still converting at over 40% in the average SEEN-powered contest. These kinds of results help you take advantage of both worlds to maximize the ROI of your social media campaigns.
NOTE: You can read Donna’s blog post that will be posted later today here on the SEEN blog. Feel free to contact us if you’d like more information on utilizing the SEEN Campaign Manager.
I use the term Social Sweeps to describe a sweepstakes or contest promotion that integrates with social media platforms. This helps to provide participants flexibility in accessing and interacting with a promotion. By providing these various options for users to participate, you appeal to them more positively which helps to increase the participation rate. I’ve always been a big believer that by utilizing social media platforms you enable participants to share your promotion with their friends which allows them to get the word out for you faster and farther!
I came across a recent study that was conducted to learn more about how and why participants share the online promotions that they’ve entered on the various social platforms. The study was done by Easypromos in which they extracted data from more than 200 promotions that were running on their Premium Application from January-February, 2015, in which over 140,000 people took part.
We now get asked quite often about allowing participants to gain bonus entries for sharing which many promotions now include. For example, after a participant enters they are asked to share on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram and they gain additional entries for each share. However, if the promotion is being run on Facebook then you would be in violation of the Facebook policy if you encourage sharing to gain entries. Instead what most Facebook applications allow is for users to invite friends to enter the promotion and if that friend enters, the original user gets an extra entry.
The team at Easypromos created this infographic that displays the results of their study, so I thought I’d share it here. It does state that participants will share the promotion much more when they are offered an incentive, such as extra entries. Take a look.
The study did show that it was almost 50/50 between desktop vs. mobile and Facebook was the top social platform for sharing. However, on January 20th, Easypromos introduced instant messaging applications as another option for mobile users to share the promotion. In that short time WhatsApp became the second most-chosen platform for sharing promotions from a mobile device: 17.19% of shares were done through this app. So this is definitely a trend to watch. Thanks to Easypromos for compiling and sharing the data.
So a faux-interview-format teaser video was posted on Hawk’s Instagram and YouTube channels to launch this new campaign, which is titled “Tony Hawk sells out. Again.”
There are three entry period in the Sweepstakes. The first drawing will be held on Father’s Day, June 16. The next drawing on June 21 and the last drawing June 24. All posts need to be completed by June 23. There will be a one Grand Prize winner for each entry period. The three winning dads will each get to take up to three guests on a trip to Vista, California to meet with Tony Hawk on August 3, 2019.
At least two of the guests must be minors, so presumably the winner will take their kids. The trip prize package includes round trip air transportation for up to four people, two nights’ hotel accommodations, a $250 allowance for a rental car, $250 spending money, a $2,000 check that may be used to assist with tax liability and a three hour party at Tony Hawk’s skate ramp including lunch and skate demo by Tony Hawk and his team of skaters. Winners must agree to be filmed during the Tony Hawk event.
