The win the Cheltenham (Grand Designs) House competition has reinvented itself yet again. This time into a free to enter win a house variant using a pixel advertising concept. Will it be third time lucky for the organiser Tim Bawtree?
A little bit of history. The Win the Cheltenham House competition is in its third version. The original contest was interrupted by the UK Gambling Commission due to concerns about its legal compliance. The revised version satisfied regulatory requirements, but then failed to sell enough tickets to give away the house, resulting in an 80,000 pound cash prize winner instead.
What’s new? Everything, except the house and organisers. It is no longer a competition but a free to enter prize draw, with a slight variation on the pixel advertising concept popularized by Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage and its evolution, Pixelotto.
Being involved in internet marketing, I was of course curious and interested to see this. However, given the track record of pixel advertising, the first thought that came to my mind was, why?
What is Pixel Advertising?
For those unfamiliar with the concept of pixel advertising, here’s a little summary. In essence, back in 2005 a young British university student created a webpage containing a grid and sold advertising on it.
Advertisers bought mini ad space on the page, and visitors curious enough to do so, would click the adverts to find out what site they linked to. The concept got media attention and took off. Traffic came in, people clicked the ads, advertisers bought up the ad space, and young Alex Tew made close to a million dollars in ad revenues.
Although some detracted from his success by asserting that he bought much of the ad space himself, to spur on sales, it remains a fact that he pulled it off unexpectedly.
Two years later Alex returned with a slightly altered concept. Perhaps realising that this time visitors would need a reason to visit his site, Alex added a prize element.
This time visitors were to click on pixel ads and be entered to win a million dollars! Unfortunately, times had moved on, and advertisers didn’t buy into it sufficiently to raise the million dollar prize.
The concept had bombed. Whereas only some marketing professionals had doubted the concept’s marketing effectiveness, when it first surfaced in 2005, by 2006 that had become a consensus.
One main reason for this was the quality of traffic generated. Most of the time, given the minuscule size of the adverts, visitors didn’t really know which site they would land on when clicking the ads. More importantly they didn’t care, and this would have been even less the case in the second version, with its added incentive to click.
Visitors are great and something everybody with a website wants, but traffic for traffic’s sake is of little value. The sheer randomness of the traffic generated lessened its value considerably.
Pixahome’s adoption of a previously unsuccessful format is surprising. Even more so, when taking into account that they successfully revised their competition, to achieve compliance. I can only imagine they assumed that their slightly altered model would somehow work for them.
The Pixahome Angle
Perhaps the most attractive attribute that came with the change in “game format”, is that now entry is free. A free win a house competition! Free is indeed a favourite online, but it isn’t enough.
So how do I enter? Well this is where is becomes peculiar. All you have to do is follow Tim on Twitter. That’s it, nothing else! Fantastic, I hear you saying. However, it’s only good for you and me as players, but what about the organiser and advertisers?
Well, entrants are encouraged to “Come back and visit the Site again as it needs your visits for this project to Work”. Uhm, I must be missing something, I thought. But no, that’s it!
There is no link between entering to win the house, and somehow creating value for the advertisers. For example, if I published the Twitter account to follow here, visitors could enter to win without ever even visiting the Pixahome website and their ads! Which would mean the advertiser receives nothing in value terms.
Of course in practice, entrants are still likely to go visit the page once or twice before entering. However the point is that they aren’t required or incentivised to do so, and hence interaction with the advertisers is likely to be minimal.
Third time lucky?
Pixelotto’s weakness lay with the quality of the traffic it generated for advertisers. However it did manage to send traffic by making entry into the prize draw reliant on visiting the advertisers’ websites.
Regrettably, without such an incentive, Pixahome may struggle to generate traffic for advertisers at all. This is an unfortunate, but I fear potentially critical flaw, at the core of the concept.
In addition, one of the first things that strike you, is just how unattractive and unpolished it looks. The Win the Cheltenham House competition has gone from having an attractive and credible shop window, to looking rather cheap and lacking credibility.
Don’t get me wrong. I do understand that perhaps the Bawtrees chose not to reinvest heavily on a third attempt. However, in that case, why didn’t they just stick with what they had?
The current site looks cobbled together, because unfortunately it is. A quick google search on “pixel advertising script” reveals a good range of alternatives.
If they were convinced of the change, why not at least purchase a similar but more complete and versatile script? The most expensive one costs $200, and is a clone of the Pixelotto website. It would make a far better impression, perform better in the search engines, and crucially allow for Pixahome to link entries to generating traffic for advertisers.
Instead it looks like one of the free variants with little functionality was implemented without much modification. This is something that, in my opinion, we see too much of amongst win a house raffles and competitions. It’s the DIY, “I’ll scrape through”, “do it on the cheap” approach.
My point is, when you are trying to give away something as valuable as a house (and you’re on your third attempt), surely you want to deliver and put the odds on your side. The $200 would have been well spent, now they’re just a false saving.
Concluding remarks
I was excited when I heard about the re-launch, as I thought the Win the Cheltenham House competition was one of the better ones, and I just love the house.
I really just expected them to do it all again but with more momentum. After all, they had a list of clients and achieved good visibility online. Of course, I don’t know what other factors might have played in their decision-making, but I find the rationale difficult to follow.
Overall, I can’t help but say that I’m disappointed with the latest version. I truly believe the overall proposition was better before.
However, despite my personal misgivings about the concept and website, I truly wish them the very best of luck! And who knows, maybe they will prove me wrong? It would truly be a phenomenal success.
I may also be guilty of looking at this from too much of a web marketing perspective, and perhaps the average visitor will see things in a very different light. Over to you. What do you think about Pixahome? Does it work for you? |
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House Raffle Blog
1 August 2010
11 August 2010