Daewoo Auto Canada, together with media partners Canoe and Sun Media, has added a new twist to the typical click-and-win promotion by using traditional media to promote and execute its recent online car giveaway.

To enter the draw, users had to locate a special icon – a Daewoo Nubira sporting a canoe on its roof – published daily in Sun newspapers, and then identify its location on the Canoe.ca Daewoo contest microsite.

The contest, which ran in the Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City and Halifax markets, targeted consumers looking to buy a vehicle in the next year. A total of 43,853 Canadians signed up for the promotion.

Hiding images within the pages of a newspaper for readers to find and identify is nothing new, says Jay Donnelly, corporate marketing director for Sun Media, but forcing them to seek out the entry ballot online is. And that combination of old and new media provided a couple of distinct advantages.

"Consumers were able to go in and find out all kinds of information, or even set up an appointment with Daewoo," he says. "In a traditional print promotion, you’d never get that depth.

"At the same time, a promotion [exclusive to] the Net has no qualifying nature to it – the newspaper stage lends credence to the contest and gives you a more qualified entrant."

The 21-day contest, which concluded earlier this month, was designed to build awareness for Daewoo, which has been operating in Canada for just over a year, and create some excitement around the all-new Nubira.

Brad Rome, national advertising manager for the Korean automaker, says it was logical to integrate an online component into the contest.

"The traditional method of finding a vehicle is newspaper, but more and more people are turning to the Internet for information and even trying to purchase vehicles online," says Rome. "It made sense to be in both media."

Online consumer incentive programs have grown in number lately, spurred on by technological advances and the growth of e-commerce activity. A wave of Canadian companies has launched online contests in the last six months, including Tridel Corporation (which recently gave away a $160,000 condominium), Canada Post, Chapters.ca, Ford Motor Company of Canada and Look Communications.

And while the obvious advantage of Web-based contests has been their potential to gather valuable demographic, behavioural and contact information about those who enter, the Daewoo initiative did not have data collection at the top of its priority list.

"Our objective more than anything was to be able to provide information to people as they came through the site," says Rome. "It wasn’t to build a database. It was to give people an opportunity to find out about us, or ask for a brochure or a test drive."

He says there are no plans to follow up with registrants via e-mail. However, he says, contest participants were asked to complete short behavioural questionnaires on both the Canoe/Daewoo contest microsite, and on the Daewoo Canada site, to which they were automatically linked once they’d finished registering for the contest.

AnneMarie Wolkman, marketing manager with Canoe, says the questions on the microsite were not automotive-specific, but rather general questions on Internet usage to help the Web portal determine the type of contests and information users are looking for. The Daewoo survey, for its part, focused on gauging the buying nature of online users and target purchasers, she says.

"Certainly there are a lot of people who utilize online contests as a way of gathering information, but [we don't want to] hinder people or make it so cumbersome that users don’t want to participate. It is an opportunity, but you don’t want to alienate your audience by asking too many proprietary questions," she says.

With the pandemic continuing to keep in-person events off the table, innovation isn’t just a bonus – it’s an imperative. Companies need creative tech to engage with consumers, whether that’s live-streaming, gaming or data-driven personalization. This is the year that remote comes first, making it an opportune time to experiment with format, devices and tools.

Joshua Richards

Director, Creative Technology, john st.