I started at Fox in the middle of the American Idol season. As one of their most popular shows, it got a lot of attention from the promotions department. Fox typically does some sort of prize giveaway every year, and this year the idea I pitched for a contest was what we went off of for a promotion.
“Idol Madness”: a March Madness inspired bracket of the remaining eight contestants. Fans and viewers would submit their brackets to Fox and winners of varying degrees would get our top four prizes. Originally, I had hoped to create a webpage just for the contest. It would be simple, with the pictures of the contestants posted above, and a blank bracket to drag their images to, similar to how Lays ran their Create Your Own Flavor campaign.
A mock up of how I thought the competition should be formatted.
To my surprise, we went with the idea. But turning that mock up into a reality was a lot more challenging than I had imagined. For starters, neither one of us was good enough at writing code to make our own website, and the other resources we turned to to host a competition via submissions were too expensive for the company. Eventually, we had to settle for a simple Google Docs format, something I suggested because my Journalism GTFs frequently send me Google Doc surveys about the progress of in-class work.
It functioned well enough, and enough people entered that it made the contest arguably successful. There were four prize giveaways in all.
Promotional banner on the main site to enter the contest.
The Google Docs survey we posted for the contest.