Originally Posted by Sirecca
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.
No, I wasn't kidding about the contest being genius marketing - I was, however, somewhat kidding about it being the invention of an Apprentice contestant. This is not a traditional 'promotion' - this is a marketing campaign designed to mix advertising with a reward. The goal of an advertisement is to grab your attention and hold it long enough for a message to get through and hopefully take effect - by combining the elements of a fun game with a fairly substantial reward, Delta was able to grab the attention of millions of customers (and potential customers), and drive home some very simple marketing ideas - all taken together, it was a fantastic way to get Delta on everyones' minds today. Look at the number of posts the contest generated here at FT, let alone all the web discount sites like Fatwallet.
Delta does know technology...I will give them that...and they know one of the easiest ways to get a message to spread quickly is dangling a desirable carrot out on the web. They did this with great success today - regardless of whether or not enough new tickets are sold to balance the cost of the campaign, I believe it worked as planned. It got Delta into the minds of millions of people - kept their attention long enough to get some sales points across - and made everyone feel good by awarding enough of an incentive to make it seem like you actually got something of value.
Now, if they would only make their seats and pitch more comfortable and get rid of MQMs, then we're really talking progress
