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WFNI partners with Jim Beam for their UPICKEM College Basketball Contest
BACKGROUND:
WFNI and 1070thefan.com took part in the annual national college basketball contest from Second Street. WFNI is owned by Emmis Communications. Its Digital team understands the importance of integrated campaigns, using not only online ads to promote this contest, but also on-air talent across all three of its stations in the Indianapolis area.
CHALLENGE:
Indianapolis has several media companies that run their own version of the College Baskeball contest. WFNI needed to present an idea to their sponsors that helped them stand out from the rest.
SOLUTION:
WFNI’s Bracket Challenge combined their listeners’ passion for the station and its personalities with the excitement of the year’s biggest college sports event to leverage a powerful interactive marketing opportunity for their sponsors. WFNI took advantage of the Second Street national prize of $1,000,000 to the player with a perfect bracket. Players also competed for round by round national & local prizes. Rather than being tied to their original picks, players picked each round progressively which kept them “in the game”, thus increasing exposure to the sponsor’s message.
The promotion for their College Basketball Contest included on-air ads, online banner ads and email reminders before each round. The presenting sponsor was Jim Beam Whiskey. The online component, beyond ROS ads, included additional online banner and radio spots promoting the contest. A larger display at the top of the contest page featured the sponsor’s logo and video commercial.
RESULTS:
UPICKEM College Basketball Bracket Contest brought WFNI $7,000 in revenue from three sponsors and had over 1,000 player participants coming back each week for 5 weeks to play.
Why the WFNI Auto Racing contest was successful:
Integrated station support. The Bracket Challenge was promoted heavily with all WFNI products including on-air talent mentions, on-air promos, online ads, VIP pickers from the station and an email campaign. Plus, all ads were sold for the full 5-week campaign.
 The group commerce space continues on a dynamic and exciting path of growth and expansion. More and more, we are seeing deal sites take cues from traditional ecommerce sites and create shopping environments – more deals, deals organized around a theme or season, and deals running beyond a single day. Ultimately, high deal quality and solid promotions will continue to drive the most revenue, but by enhancing your current site with a new approach, you can maximize your revenue and growth potential in 2012.
While certainly not a new phenomenon, Side Deals now have a more distinct role than ever. The original motivator for having Side Deals was simply to give users more variety of deals than a deal-a-day could offer. The thought was more deals meant more revenue with side deals being an area to post deals that you knew weren’t Featured Deal quality but still wanted to run. Many sites that have tested Side Deals have come to the conclusion that Side Deals as their own category aren’t huge sellers. Rather, by using Side Deals as a way to extend the life of Featured Deals, they’re seeing much better results.
This also highlights a greater trend that 24 hours isn’t always enough time to maximize sales. For example, The Miami Herald had a recent successful deal in which 65% of deals were sold after the first day. They run their deals for a total of seven days – one day as a Featured Deal and six days as a Side Deal. This approach allows you to have more deals per day and populate the site with the same high-quality deals you approve as your Featured Deals. Moreover, this begins to lay the groundwork for another trend – the emergence of Seasonal and Category Stores.
Tomorrow, we will post on the benefits of running Seasonal and Category Stores.
Who will come home with the little golden man (or men) on February 26, 2012? Now that the nominations are in, it’s time to capitalize on the excitement of Hollywood’s biggest night! The 2011 awards had 37.5 million viewers. How are you going to interact with these viewers this year?
Finding ways to engage your audience before and after the awards ceremony is key. A fantastic way to keep your audience engaged is to run a contest – have them predict who they believe will take away the award for each category. UPICKEM’s Red Carpet Movie Awards allows you to do just that. We create, manage and pick the winners for you. Your contest can be branded with one overall sponsor or several; sponsors can receive mentions in all promotions, both online and off. Your awards contest can be added to your sponsor’s Facebook page with a like-gate, email opt-ins for key user data and access to new clients, and “VIPs” that players compete against (company owners, for example).
With a variety of ad spaces on every page, your sales force can attract a number of contest-related advertisers. A few great advertisers to target are movie theaters, salons, spas and women’s retailers. You keep 100% of the sponsorship revenue. The contest has online, Facebook, mobile and tablet version that you can include in your sales package as well!
The 84th Academy Awards will be broadcast on ABC Sunday February 26, 2012. See you on the red carpet!
Second Street works with over 400 local media sites to power their deals programs, and we asked some of our partners to share their most effective promotions, favorite deals of 2011 and share their resolutions for the new year.
What are your “deals resolutions” for 2012?
“We plan to survey our merchants to better understand their experience with our program and their wants/needs of a local daily deal program, then make enhancements based on the feedback and hopefully get some testimonials. Also, we need to better understand our audience in order to help our sales team bring in deals that are fitting and desired by our users. Also, as we increase our email subscribers, we want to turn those people into buyers. We know that buyers are even more valuable than subscribers, in part, because of how often they share the deal and refer friends/family in addition to making purchases. Currently, we have an average of 8% referral rate.”
- Joe Matar and Stacey Stefani
The Gazette and KCRG, Cedar Rapids, IA
 “To become the #1 deal site in our market – we have climbed from #3 to #2 in just six months. We beat out Living Social and now we have our sights set on surpassing Groupon in 2012. In order to do that, we need our salesperson to have more time selling, so we are investing in our to program and getting a full-time assistant to help with deal calendar management and customer service. ”
- Conan Gallaty
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Little Rock, AR
“We began by running the deals for three days, but now we try to run most a full week. That’s because many of our deals sell at least as well on the final day or two as they do on the first two. We’ve found that keeping the deals around longer gives more people a chance to buy. They may be checking the current day’s deal and realize they overlooked a previous one. For 2012, we’ll be sticking to the basics – restaurants and other high-impact deals – plus grouping deals thematically around holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc.”
- Dan Day
The Modesto Bee, Modesto, CA
With 2012 upon us, there is a lot to be hopeful for in terms of the continued growth of group commerce and daily deals. Second Street works with over 400 local media sites to power their deals programs, and we asked some of our partners to share their favorite promotions and highlights from 2011.
What was your favorite deal that your site ran in 2011 and why?
“In April, we ran a deal for a Horse Camp. We didn’t know what to expect. The maximum available was 60, which is less than what we would normally take, but with a high price point of $160 a piece, we knew we would still make our revenue goals by selling out. Well, we sold out! The deal was for a 4 day horse camp in the summer (a $320 value). We learned that our audience is looking for things to do and want a good deal for a family/kids activity. And to top it off, this deal was not available anywhere else and was a unique opportunity that only we offered.”
- Joe Matar and Stacey Stefani
The Gazette and KCRG, Cedar Rapids, IA
“My favorite was David’s Burgers who sold 1,462 vouchers and, in the middle of his sale, wanted to pull the plug because too many people were coming into the business and not reading the restrictions correctly. But once Keith (the salesperson) worked with him to help show the owner how to convert these first-time visitors into loyal customers (even if they didn’t read the fine print), he was so pleased with the program that he did a testimonial for us.”
- Conan Gallaty
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Little Rock, AR
“Late in the year, we had a series of golf deals from a group of five commonly owned and managed courses. The last two sold well not only in our market but in the neighboring markets of Merced and Fresno. It was great to see a regional deal catch fire and extend our reach outside our market.”
- Dan Day
The Modesto Bee, Modesto, CA
What was your favorite deal of 2011? Share it with us in the comments section.
With 2012 upon us, there is a lot to be hopeful for in terms of the continued growth of group commerce and daily deals. Many sites experienced recording-breaking Decembers because of successful seasonal stores and promotions around the holidays. More broadly, ecommerce continues to see increased usage and tremendous year-over-year gains. Second Street works with over 400 local media sites to power their deals programs, and we asked some of our partners to share highlights from 2011.
What was your most effective promotion in 2011 for growing your email list?
“We did an enter-to-win sweepstakes in the fall of 2011 for two Iowa Hawkeye Football Tickets. It was a two-week contest with 1,360 entries. We included a pre-checked box to sign-up to receive the email for our *here’s the deal program, and we acquired 894 NEW subscribers for *here’s the deal.”
- Joe Matar and Stacey Stefani
The Gazette and KCRG, Cedar Rapids, IA
“Our best single email growth effort was a mobile sign-up at a local 4th of July event. We were on stage at a concert before the fireworks and held out an iPad2. We asked everyone in the audience (about a thousand) to text a message to a specific code to win. Then, when they got the text back, it asked them to enter in their email address to get great deals from ArkansasDailyDeal.com. We had 600+ people sign up in five minutes!”
- Conan Gallaty
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Little Rock, AR
“No matter what we do, we can’t top the results we get when we roll out a hot deal that everyone seems to want. The biggest boost our list got was shortly after we launched our Dealsaver program and featured a grocery store ad. We sold out our allotment of 1,000 vouchers within several hours; there was a frenzied reaction to the deal.”
- Dan Day
The Modesto Bee, Modesto, CA
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