WWE Raw $Million Giveaway Crashes ePrize Site

Well, there are good days and bad days when your business involves technology, and for ePrize, the leading supplier of interactive promotions, yesterday was not a good day. What every marketer fears when launching a major online promotion happened to WWE during their WWE Raw telecast last night...their promotional site crashed.

Now eprize hosts their clients' promotional websites on their servers and redirects them to an eprize.net URL, so I'm not sure if they had any problems with other client's sites, but it was reported today that the website for Vince McMahon's Million Dollar Mania Giveaway Contest  went down because of high interest and the amount of exposure the promotion had received. So while it's great that they got quite bit of traffic, it's isn't good to not be prepared to let your guests in.

From what I understand Vince McMahon announced the contest last night during WWE Monday Night RAW which airs on the USA Network. For those of us non-wrestling fans, Vince McMahon is the Chairman of the WWE Board of Directors and majority shareholder of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. In addition to owning the organization, he also wrestles often and has held both the WWE World title in 1999 and ECW World title in 2007.

Vince will be giving away a total of eight prizes, totaling $1,000,000 in this sweepstakes to be awarded live on WWE RAW next Monday, June 9th. Here's the breakdown:

• ONE GRAND PRIZE: $250,000
• TWO FIRST PRIZES: $200,000 each
• ONE SECOND PRIZE: $125,000
• ONE THIRD PRIZE: $98,000
• ONE FOURTH PRIZE: $75,000
• ONE FIFTH PRIZE: $51,998
• ONE SIXTH PRIZE: $2.00

No, that's not a typo. The last prize is actually two dollars! I guess they're trying to be funny.

The goal is to bring back and gain new viewers to WWE Raw.“This is no hoax. This is the real deal,” McMahon said to a live audience while standing at a Plexiglas podium full of play money. “Why would I give away a million dollars in cash? Maybe it’s because I’m eccentric, or maybe it’s because I’m generous. Or maybe I just want people to enjoy and watch what you enjoy every week.”

Now you can go visit the eprize promo site which is up. It invites fans to get in on the action by first entering their email address. Then it reminds then that they'll need a code to win. So next Monday June 9th at 9PM ET they can either tune into RAW on USA or visit wwe.com to find out what it is. In order to win they must be accessible during the two hours that the show is broadcast by the phone number they provided when they registered.

So, eprize I'm sure is now ready to have a record number of hits next Monday night. It will be interesting to actually go visit the website during this time frame and see if it's running slow. I can play the game, and not even watch the show. So, I'm not sure how well it will boost WWE Raw ratings. We'll have to wait and see. Either way, both WWE and eprize have gotten some publicity out of this.

Comments

[Jim Burnett]

Maybe this was a consequence of them laying off over people last week. Here is the story;
http://eprizenolimits.blogspot.com/2008/07/independence-day-for-who.html

[Donna DeClemente]

Hey Jim,
Yes I did see the stories about e-prize letting people go. Maybe some of them had something to do with this project. However, ePrize did a pretty good job of turning this negative into a positive and they got quite a lot of publicity out of it. So, we'll probably never know for sure.
Donna

[Jim Burnett]

Donna.

If gaining publicity at the cost of failing the client is your idea of good, I think you must also be drinking the Eprize koolaid. Just about every company I know would prefer success without publicity compared to the whole world knowing that the ball was dropped.

[Donna DeClemente]

Jim,
What I'm saying is that ePrize got an enormous amount of publicity around this whole WWE promotion and all the articles that I read had a positive spin to it - Josh Linker was quoted as saying that because the promotion received so much "interest and exposure" that the site went down. So in other words he was saying it was hugely successful. You got to give their PR people kudos for that.

My blog post was one of the very few that actually pointed out the fact that it was a major mistake. Any perhaps you're right about the recent firings. I hadn't connected the two incidences until now.
Donna