• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, May 7, 2015

Contest Marketing? Yeah, apparently, it's a thing. I'm not surprised, of course. After all, the ad world is excellent at coining phrases and generally, making stuff up. So Raven5, an Ontario-based agency, has created a series of whitepapers and videos to tout its contest marketing practice.

The white paper aims to define contest marketing as incentive-based marketing that uses both email marketing and social media marketing simultaneously. The agency says contests rely heavily on both as traffic drivers; email to alert new visitors to an offer and social media to increase engagement via social sharing.

The video and white paper series was developed by Raven5 President Michael Bickerton. For the video, Bickerton worked with online "Social Media Pessimist" Sean Ely to pitch the concepts through YouTube. Of the effort and of contest marketing Ely says: "It's about quality over quantity" and is a way to give the consumer "something they're going to be excited to tell their friends about." He adds contest marketing, "hits all the most important wants in one idea." 

And, there you have it. Contest marketing. Is your agency ready for this dramatic new form of marketing?