The web is ideal for running competitions, and many of the projects I worked on, from the earliest onwards, had a competition element to it.
Sure and Brit Awards were simple raffles, where users sent in their details and the client would then randomly pick a winner.
For 95 QVS, Levi’s US microsite, and Dr Oetker users had to connect to a website daily for a week to get their clue and piece together an answer.
The PayPal Winners Vault looked like a competition, but in reality the client had already paired prizes with users, and the whole application was just a fancy system for customers to claiming their freebies.
With Hair Histories users uploaded images of themselves with weirdo hairdos, and a panel would then assign prizes to them.
The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Barmer, Henkell and Wodka Gorbatschow sites were video games where the players with the highest score won a prize.
myCokeMusic would randomly assign a prize to a code as printed inside a Coke can.
Rotring involved people faxing in their doodles (scanners where not as widespread in those days), and prizes being awarded by a judging panel.
swatch-art.com was a treasure hunt carried out by teams who’d meet on the sites boards and chatlines. The prizes were plane tickets for all team members to go and meet each other.
