Ford Hockey Pool: Simple fantasy yields $75,000 in sponsorships
Summary: Newcap Radio wanted to create a contest that would track a hockey pool throughout the provence and attract national as well as local sponsors. The Ford Hockey Pool created by the group generated $75,000 in new revenues and 2334 entrants.
Challenge: NewCap Radio's 31 radio stations in Alberta, Canada run multiple promotions during the year. In 2009, a group of Newcap executives thought a hockey pool might have the potential to create a provence-wide contest and generate interest from larger advertisers.
“Most of the stations do their own thing. We wanted to get people involved from across the provence and create a monster contest.” said Leo Polin, a top account executive with NewCap. Polin met with the director of interactive, manager nontraditional sales and the promotions director to plan the contest. He also had a relationship with potential sponsors including Ford.
Strategy: The team decided the main criteria for the hockey pool was for it to be easy to enter and play, and have have regular prizes.
“We wanted to make it very simple," Polin says.
Contestants can enter anytime before Saturday and pick winners for the eight games, plus - as a tie-breaker question only - predict the score of one game.
Weekly winners get $100. There is also a Grand Prize of a $1000 certificate to Pro Skate, given to the person with the highest overall score, with two weeks thrown out. Weeks missed are filled in with the "most picked" choice. And a final sweepstakes drawing includes all the players no matter who won or how often they played.
Contestants can also easily create groups on the site for their own running office pools.
Ten days before the contest began, the stations started to promote the contest and how it worked to their audience of two million listeners.
The title sponsor, Ford, has a history of supporting ice hockey in Edmonton and Calgary. The second large sponsor is Budweiser, and there are two sponsorships available for weekly contests which can be sold locally. This year sponsorships were purchased by Game On sports, Elite Sportswear, and ProSkate, who runs a coupon for a “One free skate sharpening” (we are definitely in Canada).
Finally, the contest is built on UPickem software from Second Street Media, that supports the complex tabulation, e-mail notifications and other requirments.
Results: The Ford Hockey Pool has been the most successful contest for the group in terms of generating cash and adding long term clients. The first year contest generated 2334 players and 175,000 page views. Sponsorship revenues totaled $75,000. In 2010 Ford returned for the seond year “no questions asked.”
Lessons learned: “The biggest thing was to get everyone in the company to buy in and believe in it and really support it. We talked to all the group managers in the province, let them know right from the start. They were in from the ground floor,” Olin says. Other takeaways from the contest is to make it simple for people to enter and win, even if they don’t play every week or follow the overall tally.
The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and MediaExecsTech, developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine, to showcases perspectives from around the world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.
Keywords
newcap, radio, alberta, contests, hockey, sports
