EightBlack.

McDonalds is getting a lot of traction around its recent “You Name It” burger competition. Probably because when they concocted the damn thing in one of their test kitchens in Collingwood, the marketing folks promptly exhaled it as quickly as they inhaled it and went running off to the dunnie to get rid of the rest. They then decided, in view of wanting to keep their jobs, that they should blame the whole fiasco on the public and make the naming of the new gut buster the public’s responsibility.

Or something like that.

Anyway, there’s plenty of back slapping and cocaine inhaling along the corridors of their ad agency because, and I quote from B&T,

“A campaign by fast food giant McDonald’s to name its new burger has received 24,100 suggestions since launching on Sunday night, and is predicted to become Australia’s most successful online engagement campaign this year.

As of 11am this morning, a name was being submitted every six seconds to the NameIT Burger promotion – based on 24,100 names divided by 36 waking hours.

The campaign was developed by Leo Burnett in Sydney and features fictitious burger naming legend Ken Thomas who has retired from the ranks of McDonald’s but wants to hand the naming baton on to a younger generation.

Todd Sampson, managing partner and head of strategy at Leo Burnett said: “We are hoping that this will be the most successful online consumer engagement campaign in the country this year”.

I might take offence to this. As would one of our clients.

You see, we’ve been running viral competitions for a while now and we, unlike McDonalds, do not use above the line media (like TV or radio) to help boost registration or enrollment. I absolutely think that they work hand in hand - if you have the budget. But we don’t, and we rely purely on the internet as our sole marketing channel.

The most recent viral competition we ran over 6 weeks - which ended over a week ago, drew the following numbers.

That’s a fair bit more than McDonalds. And it’s been repeated 8 times now - in the sense that we have pushed promotion after promotion to the same database. In all cases, the total prize was no more than $10,000.

The stats above reveal that over 144,000 people actually entered the competiton we ran and more importantly, 338,000 people were referred to the competition. On average, each and every person who actually entered, referred 2.33 people.

Our competitions are always “member get member” based, because ultimately, we want an email address. A good, permission based, opt-in email address is worth anything between $5 and $20. There’s no sane acquisition manager within a credit card company or finance company that wouldn’t pay this.

I applaud the success of the McDonalds promotion. But in perspective, you need to look deeper at conversion. What was the intent of the visitor to the site? To merely engage with the company to enter a name for their product, or to tell 3 friends about it and actually go into the store to sample one. I’m betting that McDonalds would have sold a truckload anyway, given their above the line media saturation.

The McDonalds and their ad agency folks are all up in arms about this campaign being “the most successful online engagement campaign in Australia”. Is it too cynical to say “so what?”. Maybe. But really, so what and who cares.

I’m more concerned with what a client can do from the data they collect from the competition, what can they (or we) learn about our market and how can we leverage this going forward. And more importantly, can we repeat the success. Again and again.