Late Lunch

Sitting here chowing on a bag of Cheetos during a late lunch and trying not to turn my keyboard orange, I thought it might be a good time to carve out a hot minute and write a post.

It’s a nice thought to believe we can accomplish everything under our own hood in a rapid digital environment, but that’s about where it stops (a thought).

The reality is if we want to fulfill bigger and better digital moxie when it comes down to a cluster or station situation (without the resources of a larger corporate initiative), sometimes the best direction to look in is at a 3rd party whose sole focus is providing the service you are looking for.

I’m mainly speaking of web-based contesting solutions for the purpose of this little write-up, but the concept can definitely be more broad.

The Contests

We had the chance in our market to experiment with two great 3rd party platforms, San Diego-based Artistic Hub and Vancouver, BC-based Strutta. The former was our choice for a baby photo contesting platform, which as we all know can be a bit hairy to try and do on our own (from a legal and technical standpoint).

Baby Pic Palooza UI.

The super user-friendly upload process and addictive “battle-style” software was a huge win, considering the long-standing popularity of infant photography contests. Within a week we were near 1000 submissions and over one million votes. The beauty was that the software sits inside of your own domain, so it becomes a seamless part of your brand.

One of the things that lets it stand out from other contesting software is that it runs on an algorithm that randomly pits photos against each other, and counts their win percentage in a relative manner (no matter when a user uploads) & essentially omits the usual “popularity” winner to truly make sure the best photo wins.

I have plenty of in-depth stats for potential clients or for just pure traffic fun so if you are interested just email me.

The second contest, which we used Strutta for, was a tad more experimental in nature but fun nonetheless. It’s a video-based contest for Mother’s Day in which we ask listeners to upload a :30 video of them stating What Makes Mom Beautiful and then voting on the entries.

Video Entries page of our Mother's Day contest.

This one got its own custom URL, custom rules from legal built into the page, its own analytics, and a custom design. At the time of this post we’re still in the submission round, but we’re hoping it will be a nice case study at its close.

Wrap It Up

Both contests have great social media integration out-of-the-box & are super easy to use, and the vendors were just excellent to work with.

I designed each in market on top of a template and with some CSS ninja skills from my right hand man Tony Senés we were able to get these implemented and launched in a relatively timely manner.

Would love feedback if any of you guys get a moment. My keyboard is definitely orange from Cheetos now.