All this news about the Mr. Beast one-million-dollar trivia contest got me thinking about allocating money for a marketing budget. The goal is to usually attract more attention to your company and products in hopes to generate more business. It’s not uncommon for companies to spend hundreds of thousand of dollars to produce a commercial and then more to broadcast it to the appropriate audience. But is it actually better just to give the money away by making people earn it somehow to generate constant attention?
Like in this example with Mr. Beast and Salesforce giving away one million dollars has people around the world constantly talking about and in hopes that they will win the one million dollars. They don’t even need to do much as it is literally the general public that is creating the content and conversation. It reminds me of how many companies hold creative competitions and as a result thousands of people join in while creating and publishing work for it. Sometimes they have requirements such as you need to link to the competition page or to use hashtags. It’s virtually paying for advertisements in many except you probably get more long-term engagement this way.
So, it makes you wonder if giving stuff away is better for marketing. Imagine a restaurant where instead of spending say $10,000 on some ad you would simply hold a contest where a person can get say $10,000 for free as all you need to do is create a video on why you are the most deserving or how you are the restaurant’s biggest fan. Is that a better way to spend marketing money? It seems like for many it is.