Case Studies

Purpose

NET10 wanted to introduce their new brand NET10 into the pre-paid cell phone marketplace. To introduce NET10 and to get immediate traction, NET10 decided to incorporate a User Generated Content (UGC) contest element into their marketing campaign to directly interact with consumers.

Plan

NET10’s idea was to run a multi-phased competition where consumers would sing NET10’s 30-second jingle in their own original way and upload to the site. The public and a panel of celebrity judges would then vote online to declare the ultimate winner. The winning jingle version would then be aired in NET10’s radio and TV ads.

Solution

Contest Factory’s patented and proven UGC competition platform that provides increased ROI was chosen by NET10 as the ideal partner to engage its consumers. Contest Factory created and managed the new micro site for NET10 in a very short period of time, i.e. in about three weeks. Consumers visited the contest micro site to download lyrics and music. They then had the option of recording their version of the jingle utilizing Contest Factory’s built-in audio recorder or using their own audio recording tools. In addition, embedded site and media viral tools were implemented to take advantage of the viral nature of user-generated content.

Understanding the client’s need to build immediate front-of-mind product awareness for NET10, Contest Factory proposed a bracketed tournament competition (bracket competitions work like the NCAA Basketball tournament, NBA Playoffs, Wimbledon, etc). To take advantage of the increased ROI from brackets, Contest Factory proposed and built a multi-round bracketed competition. This allowed consumers to interact with the NET10 brand and product offerings multiple times as they kept coming back to the NET10 micro site to enter their jingles and/or vote for their favorite submissions, round after round.

To maintain fairness in the competition, Contest Factory also incorporated a “celebrity judge module”, where a number of respected music industry people would vote on the jingle submissions, parallel but independent from the public votes. Using Contest Factory’s patented platform, fans and celebrity judges were assigned equal weights for their aggregated votes in determining the winners. The client was able to monitor the campaign’s performance with Contest Factory’s Viral DNA^TM tracking and reporting software. To further increase the ROI for the client, in addition to the championship prize for the best jingle, Contest Factory also used its embedded sweepstakes module to award loyalty points to repeat visitors and active users of the micro site.

Results

The introduction of the NET10 product line via a UGC competition was so successful within the first few weeks that the client decided to specifically target the Spanish speaking consumers with a similar competition. Because of Contest Factory’s state-of-art patented platform, multiple competition groupings ran simultaneously and both the English and Spanish competition assets were hosted in the same site, but from separate consumer landing pages. NET10 was extremely satisfied with the performance and ROI of Contest Factory’s bracketed competition platform to help launch the NET10 brand in 2005. NET10 turned the “NET10 National Audition Contest” into a recurring national event and retained Contest Factory as a trusted marketing partner each year thereafter.