It’s not damaging or terrible but they’ll surely be losing potential fans because of it.
This advert appeared and appealed to me this morning, a $75,000 would be awesome!
So when I clicked through I’d expect big & clear instructions on how to get my hands on that $75k and probably see other people suggesting their ideas. But alas I didn’t, and it wasn’t until I returned to their page that I noticed a small piece of text explaining the situation.
So I went off to their website to see if I could find anything more about it… again I found nothing.
They paid for my eyeballs and I was ready to be converted, sign up and connect with Pringles, it was just all too hard. Also, people who organically found the fan page wouldn’t realise the enormity of the party competition.
Update: 21st September 2009
The campaign was still running, so I click on the ad and attempted to participate, and this time there was a page about the competition. I gave Pringles permissions to post messages to me, on my wall and to my friends (which is a big ask) and I was all ready to do whatever this campaign was but after I’d done all this I discovered the comp was over.
I’m guessing I had a pretty unqiue experience due to bad timing, as their fan page has increased from 90k+ to 240k+, a pretty good result.
What they might’ve done:
- wait until the comp was ready to announce
- use their fan page image & news feed to advertise the full details of the comp and what to expect
- added some information to their website about it
- created some way for me to signup via email or mobile to receive annoucements about it
- turnd off the competition adverts when the campaign was over
- changed the competition page to say ‘competition closed’ before I entered my details, not after