Though Acura may spend multiples of that amount advertising the promotion, that's the suggested retail price of the grand prize, the Sport Wagon. Car giveaways are the common prize for auto promotions, whether they're on Facebook or via location-based services. For instance, a new scavenger hunt promo from Buick that uses location-based services offers a grand prize of a Buick, though there is a smaller prize of $2,000 for semi-finalists. Nissan's "Juke the City" promo with SCVNGR offers...a new Nissan Juke.
Why base a national promotion on the price of one car? Wouldn't the carmakers be better off offering $1 million or maybe a dozen cars instead?
Probably not. Rodney Mason, chief marketing officer of promotions firm Moosylvania, says that automakers are at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to promotions since they can't offer small prizes to large amounts of people. Instead, they have to offer one big prize to one person, or at best, a handful of contestants.
Mason says the gold standard for promotions that actually engage large amounts of people is McDonald's Monopoly, which starts with a national free-standing insert in various newspapers that offers everyone a free order of fries. With a sweepstakes promo, most people assume they won't win, so there's much less participation.
Mason says a 5% response rate is very good for an auto promotion like Acura's. But would auto promotions do better if they offered, say, 10 cars instead of one? The answer is no. "The number of prizes and the dollar value is really irrelevant," Mason says.
Another reason that automakers can get away with such relatively skimpy prizes is that activation is easy on Facebook. "Normally only having one prize would limit participation but this is not necessarily the case on Facebook," says Drew Neisser, the CEO of Renegade, a social media and marketing consultancy. "That’s because its just so easy for the consumer to hit the 'like' button and enter. Brands are using sweepstakes to inflate their like counts attracting a wide but not necessarily engaged audience."