PROMO’s 2007 Interactive Marketing Awards Winners

PROMO Magazine consistently gives its audience a “what works and why” coverage on marketing trends and news. Their annual Interactive Marketing Awards recognizes the best and most effective interactive tactics used in motivating consumer response. Check out the 8 first-prize winners of the 2007 Interactive Marketing Awards, their brand campaign results, how they achieved them, and how you can use their ideas.

As overall winner, Sony Picture Entertainment won in the “Best Campaign, Promotional Web Site” category with their Google campaign for “The Da Vinci Code” movie. To attract a younger audience to this film about cracking codes and mysteries, the campaign offered over 12,000 separate puzzles based on the movie characters and plotlines. The first 10,000 players to work their way through all the puzzles won a replica from the film and went on to the final mystery. Players used Google Maps and book-search functions to find clues. The interactive promotion was enormously successful in generating awareness about the film and keeping audiences engaged. Over 1 million unique users tried to crack the codes while playing 9 million puzzles, individually and in teams.

In the “Viral Promotion” category, OfficeMax achieved an incredible level of viral publicity with ElfYourself.com, a holiday website where visitors added their faces and voices to elves, then emailed the results to friends. This humorous soft sell tactic generated an average of 41,000 elves per hour, drew 36 million visitors in the five weeks it was up, and boosted traffic to OfficeMax.com by 20%.

The other 2007 Interactive Marketing Awards winners were:

• “SMS/MMS Mobile Marketing” Category: Verizon Wireless
• “Loyalty Marketing” Category: Coca-Cola Co.
• “E-Mail Marketing” Category: McDonald’s
• “Search Engine Marketing” Category: Harley-Davidson
• “New Media” Category: Indianapolis Motor Speedway
• “Trial Recruitment” Category: MasterCard Worldwide