Voting competitions continue to rear their ugly head on Facebook! Autoglass are the latest brand to come under the microscope with their win a Samsung laptop competition. You need to upload “a photo or video showing you with whatever device you use to browse the internet” and then get people to vote for you. The winner will be the entrant whose submission has the most votes. A quick glance at the rules and Autoglass state that they “may always and at any time disqualify any entrant to the competition who has participated in any form of vote rigging or fraudulent voting practice”. They also say that “the votes of any person who has voted in response to a vote rigging or fraudulent vote creation campaign shall not be eligible votes for the purposes of this competition”. So, we can assume that they’re fully aware that people will try and gleam votes by any means possible! Which begs the question why the heck are they running a voting competition?
Best Creativity Goes Unrewarded
The same question is being posed on the Autoglass Facebook Wall where some pro and anti voting competition comments are being made. However, the main issue regarding voting competitions is overlooked. Lets’s assume that Autoglass know about vote buying sites and vote for me Facebook pages. Then let’s assume they’ve put things in place to make sure people are only gaining votes in a fair manner. With that in mind – which entry will win? Will it be the most creative entry? Autoglass even state on their competition page “Handy Tip: the more creative your entry, the more votes you are likely to receive!”. Utter nonsense! The winner will simply be the person with the largest social outreach or methodology to gain votes. We know that, you know that, anyone involved in competitions should know that. So why bother with the creative element of this competition? It’s pointless, it serves no purpose and the best entry goes totally unrewarded!
Back To The Drawing Board
The simple fact is that agencies and brands devising competitions need to go back to their drawing boards and decide what the aims are! If the aim of the promotion is to encourage creativity around the brand then they really do need to forget about public vote mechanics. If they want creativity then they need judge the efforts made by entrants. If, however, the aim is to just encourage people to beg for votes then brands really do need to get rid of the creativity element of the competition. It will save everyone time. All you have to do is ask those interested to share the same image and get the most clicks/votes/likes/whatevers. Yes it’ll be a voting competition but at least there’s no nonsense involved in doing anything worthwhile only for those efforts to be wasted because one person is willing to sell their soul for extra votes. It’ll be interesting to see whether Autoglass follow Tesco and AX Paris, both of whom last week responded to discord about their voting competitions.