Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Chevy rewards best seeders for Super Bowl ad competition

This is an interesting example that's been generating quite a lot of debate among my contacts on Twitter this morning.



To help generate views for the user-generated videos that Chevy wants to choose a Super Bowl ad from, they have decided to hold a competition to see who can share the films the most.

It's all done through this MSN site.  Entrants need to sign up, then share on their different networks.  At the end the one who's judged to have shared the most will win $10,000 - although Chevy have given themselves up to two weeks after the end of the competition to award the prize, presumably to verify the levels of shares.  All films need to be shared in their 'MSN' version, so no embeds or YouTube links, which is frustrating.

A lot of people have problems with what Chevy are doing, but I think as an idea it's pretty smart.  All they are really doing is taking the paid seeding out of the hands of people like GoViral and let the sharers get involved directly.  It's a like a 'media' version of incentivising people to create user-generated content - ideally they'd do it for free, but this gives a reward.

(Some film companies have been doing this for a few years.  When Shaun of the Dead & Hot Fuzz were released American Spaced fans to compete in posting links, banners, forum posts and so on, to win merchandise from the film.  However this is on a larger scale, and involves a cash prize)

Of course it would be chaos if every brand tried to do this...

1 comment:

Chevy Minneapolis said...

If they are lucky they will get a ton of people to share for $10k which is probably cheaper than a big media campaign.

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