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Making competition entries public – it’s a no go!

By Sarah Burns on July 25, 2012

We’ve seen a rise in creative competitions that request for entries to be pinned to Pinterest, or uploaded to a Facebook page or a website gallery. While it might not fit your marketing requirements, making competition entries public before the closing date breaches the CAP code – the rule book for how prize promotions in the UK must be conducted.

‘What? Why?’ you’re probably shouting (our best practise advice on this particular subject is generally met with some surprise). Put simply, competitions which are conducted in this way are unfair. If everyone can see entries as they are posted, the competition ceases to be a level playing field. Those people that enter at the beginning may have had an original idea but there will always be others that just use these entries for inspiration and submit a similar yet improved version, while some contestants will wait until just before the closing date to see what has already been submitted then use this to their advantage to upload something better and unique to improve their chances of winning.

The CAP code states that ‘Promoters must conduct their promotions equitably…. must avoid causing unnecessary disappointment.’

There is nothing equitable about a competition where everyone can see entries as they are submitted. It doesn’t matter if you’re asking contestants to upload a recipe, or a photo, or even just leave comment, if you are judging these entries against a set criteria, the principle remains the same. To avoid contestants complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority, or complaining loudly on social media sites and forums, ensure all entries to your competition are not received in an open forum. You can put them all online the minute the competition closes, even if they haven’t been judged.

Tesco Mum of the Year 2013

By Spark and Fuse on July 23, 2012

An exciting week for Spark & Fuse as we found out that for the eighth consecutive year we are the event management agency for Tesco Mum of the Year 2013! We’ve already secured a new venue for the 2013 event and plan to help make it bigger and better than ever before.

Pixie Lott dancing at Mum of the Year 2012

Pixie Lott enjoying Mum of the Year 2012

We’re delighted to be working on this fabulous and rewarding project again. Over the years we’ve had the privilege of meeting some exceptional mums who have made a real difference to the lives of others. And each time when the awards finally close, after 7 months of hard work, we find ourselves in tears as we say goodbye to the winners. And no doubt it will be the same for the 2013 event.

If you know a mum who you think deserves to be honoured as a Tesco Mum of the Year, the 2013 nominations are now open, http://www.tescomagazine.com/mum-of-the-year/nominate.html

Fuse’s radio debut

By Spark and Fuse on July 20, 2012

For those that missed Fuse’s fabulous radio debut last week as a guest on the Tycoon Women Moments Radio Show, here’s your chance to catch up with her chatting about her journey to success through seven pivotal life changing moments http://tycoonwomen.com/juliette-thomas-ive-realised-where-im-at-is-very-content/. Check out her crazy tune choices!

Tycoon Women is run by Ola Agbaimoni, who has recently joined forces with Lilach Bullock at Socialable, a social media and marketing company, and together plan to make it the number one agency for online marketing and social media.

Olympic prize promotion round-up

By Juliette Thomas on July 13, 2012

Two weeks and counting! We’re on tenterhooks here at Spark & Fuse HQ, and can’t wait for the Olympics to kick off.  Spark has been caught limbering up behind her desk (no, she’s not competing in the games, but is warming up for the serious amount of walking she’ll be doing over the next few weeks in order to get to meetings) and Clair has promised to bake us some Olympic themed cupcakes to scoff so we’ve lots of sugary energy!  While you wait with anticipation to see how London will deal with the influx of athletes, visitors, volunteers and workers, check out our round-up of Olympic prize promotions below – and see if you can’t bag yourself some of these fabulous tickets to the games.

Now, this one closes tonight at 23.59 (GMT) so you’ll need to be fast off the starting block to take on blogger Pippa Wright’s Coca-Cola Olympic Games Sustainability Challenge in a bid to secure yourself some tickets to see the Athletics on Tuesday 7th August (including travel and accommodation).

For those that like a more leisurely deadline to work to, try this one which ends 25th July.  The prize?  To watch the Men’s 100m final AND beach volleyball.  It doesn’t get better than that.

For the creative people out there, simply upload a maximum of two photographs that you think best capture the ‘Spirit of the Olympics’ and you could be in with a chance to win two Olympics tickets, two UK Picture Editors’ Guild Award tickets and superfast BT Infinity.

Calling all EDF customers! There are Olympic tickets up for grabs as part of their ‘Thank You’ campaign. You can find out more here.

Tesco and P&G are offering VIP tickets to the Opening Ceremony plus 25 other pairs of tickets in their text to win promotion.  You just need to purchase a P&G product to take part.

For our younger readers (10 to 18 years old) who would like to be in with chance to win tickets to the Olympic Torch Relay Concert to watch Dizzee Rascal, The Wanted, Eliza Doolittle and Mark Ronson, check out this promotion. It closes on 15th July, so sprint on over to Shout Mag now.

Spark is in good shape to take on the star-jump challenge after all her stretching, but what challenge would you take on in this Samsung Warm-Up & Win Competition?

Good luck. And don’t forget to let us know if you are a lucky winner!

Running a promotion on Facebook?

By Sarah Burns on July 11, 2012

No Likey

No Likey!

Not only must a prize promotion in the UK adhere to the CAP code, if it’s on Facebook, it must also meet regulations set by Facebook, too. And if you breach its terms, you could find your page is removed. And we don’t want that, do we! Not everyone is aware that Facebook has its own regulations, so we’ve put together a little summary which will help you to get it right.

First and foremost, you cannot run a prize promotion from your wall. Facebook stipulates that you must use a third party application to build and administer your promotion. This means you have to add a tab to your page from which your run the prize promotion. Don’t panic if this sounds like an enormous and expensive coding job. There are loads of apps online which you can download to help administer your prize promotion. Here are just a few: Wildfire, Snapapp, Strutta and Shortstack.

Once you’ve built this prize promotion platform, the only functionality you can use as a condition of entry is either liking the page, checking in to a place or connecting to your app.

What you can categorically not do is use liking your wall post, leaving a comment on your wall or uploading an image to your wall as a means of entry or condition of registration. And this is where most promoters fall foul of the regulations. You can ask entrants to do any of these things as part of the process but it cannot be the actual entry – entrants must leave their details via the lovely app you’ve built. Otherwise how can you tell the difference between someone just liking your page because they like it, or because they are entering your prize promotion?

To see the do’s and don’ts for yourself, the full regulations can be found here:  www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php

Good luck with your prize promotion!

Wizard of Oz(someness)!

By Spark and Fuse on July 4, 2012

Spark & Fuse at Wizard of Oz

(Apologies for the blurry pic. And Spark's comb over)

Never work with children or dogs. We’ve all heard that one. But boy are we glad the creative team behind the Wizard of Oz musical ignored that piece of advice.

Spark & Fuse employees were treated to tickets, courtesy of milktwosugars.com, who clicked their little red shoes, and sent us on our way to the Palladium Theatre in London last night to enjoy the spectacular Wizard of Oz musical.

And what a musical it was.  We immediately fell in love with all the characters (is it wrong to have a crush on a scarecrow?), and there were audible gasps as Glenda the good witch appeared on stage. Let’s just say we have spent quite a lot of time talking about ‘that’ dress. Toto the (very real) dog was as cute as a button (and so well behaved), and the children singing ‘We represent the Lullaby League/Lollipop Guild’ had us chuckling in our seats. Des O’Conner played the great wizard, and despite Fuse genuinely believing Spark, we can confirm it wasn’t Antony Worrall-Thompson playing the lion.

There was one fabulous song after another and the pyrotechnics and cinematic effects were brilliantly executed making us feel as if we were all on the same trip as Dorothy from Kansas to the Emerald city.

The only difficult part was remembering to sing ‘inside our heads’ when, quite frankly, we were all sorely tempted to belt out the old favourite ‘Over the Rainbow’ along with Dorothy.

If you see one musical this year, make it the Wizard of Oz. It just shot in as our all-time favourite.