Anyone who has ever tried to win an online contest could learn something from Adrian Piccardi.
Piccardi, a 20-year-old freelance movie editor, has netted $23,000 in the last eight months by taking first place in three best-video competitions, campaigning by giving away beer and reaching out to more than 100,000 "friends" on MySpace for votes.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, August 29, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part Page News Desk 1 inches; 38 words Type of Material: Correction
Online contests: An article in the Business section on Saturday about the lengths to which contest entrants go for votes misspelled the last name of Shahi Ghanem, chief executive of San Diego-based online contest company Brickfish, as Chanem.
He's a marketer's dream. By going to extraordinary lengths to persuade people to cast ballots in online contests, Piccardi has sent hundreds, even thousands, of users to websites that are trying to sell something.
This is how it works: After setting up a user-generated contest, as it's called, all a marketer has to do is sit back and count the hits. That explains why advertisers will spend $4.3 billion by 2011 on user-generated content sites, including YouTube and Flickr, up from $450 million in 2006, according to research firm EMarketer.
"People become their own marketing team, but they're marketing your brand," said Nadia Nascimento, a project manager at Memelabs of Vancouver, Canada, which designs and runs online contests. "They're very creative about the way they go about doing this."
Substitute teacher Leigh Meunier didn't just ask her students to vote for her basset hound Lager in the Smoochable Pooch challenge sponsored by Kibbles 'n Bits.
She enlisted a teacher friend to encourage kids in her high school science classes to click on Lager's photo. Meunier also dispatched her mother to post fliers touting Lager at the hospital where she worked in New Jersey.
And Meunier herself voted -- many, many times -- using about 50 computers at the school in Boston where she was substituting at the time.
After all that, Lager didn't take the top prize of a trip to Los Angeles, $1,000 and a lifetime supply of Kibbles 'n Bits. Meunier said her pet, one of 4,563 entrants, "lost to a stupid pug from Virginia."
Del Monte Corp., on the other hand, was a big winner. Its Kibbles 'n Bits brand got loads of attention, considering that nearly 5 million ballots were cast. And voters presumably saw the ad posted on the website for a new dog food that cleans pooches' teeth "for sweet-smelling kisses."
On the all-contest-all-the-time Brickfish website (www .brickfish.com), every entry in a competition sponsored by Givenchy is generating about 200 comments, said Linda Maiocco, vice president of marketing for Parfums Givenchy, which is part of the French luxury goods maker LVMH.
