Originally Posted by bocastephen
From Delta's perspective, the game, which I still consider ingenious, was a chance to reinforce their message through active participation by a customer (or potential customer) - which is excellent marketing. Perhaps they figured on collecting a flat placement fee from the sponsors and then just fronted the remaining "cost" of the miles (not everyone got the full 10K it seems) on the books as part of the marketing budget to offset the liability of all these extra miles being issued.
Or....this game was the winning marketing submission by one of The Apprentice players and its creation will be seen on an upcoming episode.
Ingenious? Please tell me you're kidding. Unless you really do have a second life as an Apprentice contestant. (Since this contest probably would pass for genius among those morons.)
Think of all the mainstream DL miles promotions that require you to actually BUY STUFF (either from DL or their partners) for substantially fewer miles. You're lucky to get a few hundred miles for a car rental or hotel stay. And think how hard they work to get you to sign-up for an AMEX card for the same 10k miles. How has this promotion benefited DL? The questions were so lame (and the answers so obvious), it's difficult to believe that anyone actually LEARNED anything about DL's business. With few expections, I'm sure everyone zipped past the partner promotions. Maybe it's worth a few hundred miles as a throw-away promotion (thought it's probably not worth the cost of development), but anything beyond that is pure insanity.