Thursday, April 01, 2004

Unlucky draws

AdAsia Magazine, Singapore, April 2004 issue

Lucky draws seem to be the promotion du jour in marketing land, these days. You can’t go anywhere without stumbling over the option to fill in your name and win the big prize. Condo? Mercedes? Or the more mundane variant, a $250 voucher? It can all be yours, lucky consumer, if you buy our product. Oh yes, the product, you’d almost forget, that’s the reason the draw is being held in the first place. Which name shall we write on the credit card?

Lucky draws, or sweepstakes as the Americans call them, have been in use for decades. They are not only used to give marketing campaigns a bit more vim. Marketers all over the place are discovering the importance of knowing something about their consumers. Who they are, where they live, why they buy your product, the works. But good information is often hard to come by. Lucky draws are rapidly becoming a popular way to generate names and contact details of consumers.

They’re also the worst. Lucky draws are the spam of sales promotions. There are more similarities than you might think. Let's draw some parallels.

Spam is untargeted mail. Lucky draws are untargeted promotions. They don’t appeal to a specific group of consumers, so it’s an easy way out if you’re not too sure about your target group. You just target everyone and presto, you might even hit the right guy! Yeah, right.

As a result, consumers can’t distinguish one lucky draw from another. Many respond because it appeals to their gambling instincts and nothing else. Often they forget all about the product itself. And when you follow up with a mailing or telemarketing call, they have no idea how you got their name. In other words, it’s one of the things that give Direct Marketing a wholly undeserved bad name.

Like spam, lucky draws are cheap. That’s why they’re both so persistent. Buy one prize and a stack of participation forms and you’re set – just rake in the names. But like spam, results of lucky draws can backfire on the quality of your marketing proposition. Spam gives you a bad name; lucky draws give you bad information. If you ask people to give some answers, the only reliable information you will get is their address. After all, they’re out to win the prize so they want to be reached.

But they’ve nothing to gain in answering anything else. In fact, people often start wondering about why asking any other questions is necessary in the first place. They get suspicious and uncooperative. They will fill in anything. Legendary is the example of the website that used a lucky draw to get its visitors to leave both email and postal addresses. They did gather an email list, but the majority of the contestants said they lived in Afghanistan – it was the first country on the drop-down menu…

And finally, lucky draws, like spam, are on their way to become a major irritant. Granted, spam is way ahead in that game. But draws are getting there. We’ve already seen letters in the Straits Times by people who claim to be flooded by telemarketing calls after taking part in one. Even if unjustified, it’s a bad sign that people are starting to blame lucky draws for inconvenient or wrongful use of their personal data.

Fortunately, this is where most similarities end. Spamming is a major plague and in an increasing number of countries even against the law. Lucky draws are just a sign of desperation, a last resort for those who could think of nothing else. Hopefully, both clients and agencies will accept the challenge and come up with better ideas.