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10 reasons to launch marketing competitions

10 reasons to launch marketing competitions

by | Apr 14, 2025 | Animation, Branding, Conversion

Marketing competitions are an essential part of the panoply of advertising levers available to brands. Above all, this type of animation creates new opportunities to interact with audiences.

From the simplest scenario to the most immersive and entertaining, these interactive marketing experiences can provoke an emotion in participants, helping them to retain the information better. Visit gamification is a powerful process that firstly provokes amusement (through the game), but also more subtle emotions such as appreciation (with a scoring game) and pleasure (the fact of winning something). These emotions are more readily present thanks to the active nature of advertising, unlike traditional, passive advertising.

The marketing competition must be designed and organised around the brand’s key issues. Here’s 10 reasons to launch a marketing competition.

SUMMARY

  1. Gain visibility
  2. Creating virality
  3. Getting a message across
  4. Promoting a product in an original way
  5. Mark an important event
  6. Supporting a promotional period
  7. Finding new customers
  8. Get to know your audience better
  9. Building customer loyalty
  10. Leading your teams internally

1. Gain visibility

Marketing competitions are highly effective tools for enhancing a brand’s image, raising awareness or simply communicating about a product, service or event.

The operation dissemination stage is crucial, as it is here that companies will be able to reach the widest possible target audience. The main advantage of a competition is that it can be broadcast very simply via any channel, thanks to a simple URL. It can also be integrated directly into a web page, for an even more immersive effect. By using several advertising channels at the same time, the process of promoting the operation is even more effective.

Here are the different channels through which a competition can be broadcast, with the aim of increasing its visibility:

  • Email campaigns (in a banner for example)
  • Media coverage on social networks (Facebook Ads, TikTok Ads, Instagram Ads etc.)
  • Via display advertising

2. Create virality

Widely-distributed competitions help to raise brand awareness via a wide, multi-channel distribution network. But it’s also interesting to bet on the target audience itself to spread the operation virally.

Certain types of marketing competitions allow for this, such as the Social Gauge.. Cette mécanique incite les participants à partager le jeu sur les réseaux sociaux. Plus il y a de nouveaux inscrits, plus les parrains ont de chance d’être tirés au sort pour gagner des récompenses.

 

marketing competitions social ratings

3. Getting a message across

Organising and promoting a competition gives brands the opportunity to spread different types of message in a creative, original and effective way.

A variety of scenarios can be put in place to suit the audience and convey the specific message that the brand wants to share with its target audience.

Here are a few examples of marketing competitions to get a message across:

  • A fun quiz can be used to communicate interactively about a service or a new product, or even to educate people about the world of the brand and its history.

  • A Blindtest immerses participants in a world, the ideal way to get audiences going and leave a lasting impression.

4. Promoting a product in an original way

Brands can broadcast messages via each stage of a competition. The home page, for example, highlights a theme, prizes to be won or a new product. The gamified mechanics or the results page encourage people to visit the website or a product page to find out more about the offers.

To increase the chances of participants visiting the site at the end of the operation, it is possible to give away promotional codes via an instant prizes system. By taking part, players can immediately see if they have won something, and can use the promotional code directly by visiting the site.

Here are a few examples of competitions to promote a product:

  • The Gift Finder asks participants to fill in a personalised questionnaire. At the end of the operation, they find out which gift or product is ideal for them.

  • The voting mechanism makes it possible to highlight products while collecting product preferences from its audiences.

marketing competitions survey

5. Mark an important event

Marketing competitions can support a communication campaign around a major brand event. To ensure that the operation performs well and achieves its marketing objectives (lead recruitment, engagement, conversion, etc.), the various stages of communication surrounding the operation must be respected.

First of all, it’s important to tease out the forthcoming operation to ensure that it attracts traffic at the time of launch.

Then it’s a question of animating your audiences during the event. There are several ways of doing this, depending on the type of event:

  • For a trade fair or festival, the company can offer tickets to be won beforehand by means of random drawing, but it can also offer prizes to be won on the spot with a Wheel of Fortune, for example.
  • Is a brand celebrating its birthday? Now’s the time to delight its customers and fans with a fun event that makes a lasting impression by offering prizes to be won over a given period.

6. Support a promotional period

Are the sales, Black Friday or exclusive private sales days for loyal customers just around the corner? This is the ideal time to launch an operation to boost sales and maximise conversions.

Marketing competitions can serve several purposes:

  • Attract customers to the website by offering them the opportunity to take part in a game on the theme of sales to win discount vouchers via their social networks.
  • Doing drive to store (in-store use of discount coupons won online)

Get even more sales by stimulating post-purchase (participants can earn additional discounts by uploading their proof of purchase).

7. Finding new customers

Marketing competitions and lead generation go hand in hand. In fact, this objective, which has been widely pursued by brands throughout the year, is now a sensitive one, against a backdrop of the end of third-party cookies and the protection of personal data.

Marketing competitions are an effective way of recruiting qualified leads and attract new customers. By offering attractive prizes, the brand encourages prospects to get involved.

On the other hand, competitions increase brand visibility by encouraging participants to share the competition with their network, which can attract new prospects and potential customers.

8. Get to know your audience better

Marketing competitions are an effective way of collecting qualified data on participants.

By asking participants to fill in a registration form to take part in the competition, it is possible to obtain valuable information about their preferences and interests. By including optional questions, you can gather more specific data about their consumer habits. customer database is enriched. It is also possible to personalise future marketing campaigns and better understand the needs of your target audience.

Please ensure that you comply with data protection laws and clearly inform participants about the use of their data in accordance with the confidentiality policy.

9. Building customer loyalty

Marketing competitions can also be an effective tool for building customer loyalty. By offering exclusive competitions to loyal customers, the brand encourages them to stay involved and continue interacting with its products or services.

Competitions can be designed to reward loyalty by offering exclusive benefits or free products, for example. This can help to strengthen the relationship by creating a sense of belonging and mutual esteem.

Competitions can also encourage customers to share their experience with their network, which can lead to greater visibility for the brand and attract new customers.

10. Leading your teams internally

Marketing competitions are not just for brands and companies selling products or services. They are also very useful in internal communication. En effet, ils permettent de :

  • Training employees using quizzes
  • Boost group cohesion (like digital team building) through a participative game or team game
  • Encourage productivity by challenging people via an open poll, such as an idea box.

Taking the temperature of well-being at work via a survey

Conclusion

In conclusion, marketing competitions offer many advantages to brands. They can increase visibility, go viral, get a message across, promote a product or mark an important event. To find out more, discover 8 tips for a successful interactive campaign!

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Gamification, the driving force behind successful marketing campaigns

Gamification, the driving force behind successful marketing campaigns

by | Apr 14, 2025 | Audience engagement, Captivate the audience, Collect data

Gamification marketing means creating interactive experiences to capture the attention of audiences, collect data and activate it.

Today, brands are seeking innovative marketing solutions that can address new challenges, especially in a context where advertising needs to reinvent itself (end of third-party cookies). Gamification is one of the tools available to marketing teams to communicate differently.

Let’s find out in more detail how gamification can become the driving force behind the success of your next marketing campaigns.

What exactly is gamification marketing

This technique involves integrating game elements into an overall marketing strategy, with a view to increasing consumer engagement and boosting sales. Brands create interactive and playful experiences for their customers. By interacting with the content, they remember them more easily.

To understand gamification in very concrete terms, let’s take the example of a game. Let’s imagine an advertisement for a pen. In a traditional advertisement, the brand simply displays a photo of the pen. The pen is highlighted by a colorful and attractive design. In a gamified ad, the pen invites web users to play a game of tic-tac-toe. By clicking on a button, they are immersed in an interactive experience with the product. If they succeed in the game, they can win a discount voucher to buy the product.

There are many different competition game mechanics. There are gauges, scores, league tables, instant wins, countdowns, scratch-offs, casino games, quizzes and polls, and so on. These fun and creative animations can be adapted ad infinitum according to the objectives of the brands and the knowledge of their audience.

We will now look at the benefits of gamification for advertising strategies.

The 4 benefits of marketing gamification

Catch the attention and getting to be known

The first challenge for brands is to stand out from the competition. The aim is to increase visibility and brand awareness, attract new customers, introduce a new product, etc.

With online games and challenges integrated into the advertising device, visitors pay much more attention to the message. A customer who has a fun and enjoyable experience on a site will remember the brand longer. This can go far as to create an emotional bond, influencing the decision to buy.

As far as events are concerned (whether on social networks, a website or a newsletter), recurring high points such as Christmas, Easter, etc, help to reach a wide audience. Audiences are brought together in a festive atmosphere that encourages play. The brand can also create its own highlights (brand anniversary, organised event, trade fair, etc.).

Engaging audiences

It’s undeniable that audience engagement is greater when content is interactive. The reason is simple. Games offer a fun action that attracts the visitor’s attention before asking them for specific information of action. For example, giving their contact details, installing an app, or giving their opinion in a survey. This is the first step in establishing a brand-consumer relationship.

Interactive games can be used to encourage users to explore a company’s products and services, for mechanics that highlight the features or benefits of the products (quizzes, shopping lists, etc.).

They are also engaging in terms of the time spent with the brand, thanks to mechanisms that capitalise on the spirit of competition (score-based games, gauges, etc.). Finally, the appeal of a gift or promotion revealed at the end of the campaign can generate massive number of new leads.

In the example below, Leroy Merlin launched an operation to survey its audiences about their ranges, while recruiting new leads. In total, over 3.5 million clicks and opinions were collected.

 

game marketing data collection

Boost conversions

Interactive games are also an excellent way of boosting conversions, through the distribution of attractive discounts. These prizes are offered as part of a 100% winning scheme, where each participant automatically receives a voucher. Brands can also offer gift vouchers in exchange for proof of purchase. This encourages customers to buy more products by playing the campaign again.

As well as driving participants to the website for immediate consumption, these game campaigns can also support a period of in-store promotions. Consumers are encouraged to buy more products to increase their chances of winning the reward.

Finally, thanks to the installation of conversion pixels, it is possible to directly measure the sales generated by a game campaign. This feature is particularly useful for brands that want to closely monitor the results of their campaign and evaluate its effectiveness.

Collecting and activating data

By using interactive games as part of their marketing strategy, brands can collect data on consumer preferences and buying habits. This data on existing and potential customers enriches their CRM database. This in-depth knowledge of customers enable brands to personalise their communications. Loyalty programs, for example, offer rewards for repeat purchases. This encourages customers to remain loyal to the brand and buy more products.

In addition, the data collected can also help brands to recruit new leads and acquire new customers. The information collected via interactive games can be used to create more effective and better targeted advertising campaigns. Brands can also use this data to create programmatic lookalike audiences to expand their base of qualified prospects.

By using this information to improve their product and service offering, brands can increase their conversion rate and sales while strengthening their relationship with consumers.

Conclusion

In short, gamification is a powerful marketing strategy for stimulating customer engagement, generating leads and collecting qualified data. Brands that choose to integrate interactive games into their marketing strategy enjoy a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace.

A tool like Adictiz, for example, enables you to create and distribute these interactive formats, give them media coverage, manage data collection and integration into your CRM, and finally activate the data. Relying on a comprehensive platform for launching gamified campaigns means making the choice of performance, with formats tailored to each message.

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Reinventing your campaigns with programmatic advertising: benefits, challenges and best practices

Reinventing your campaigns with programmatic advertising: benefits, challenges and best practices

by | Apr 8, 2025 | Captivate the audience, Media

In France, consumers are exposed to an average of over 1,200 advertising messages a day. Between television, social networks, online banner ads and mobile notifications… Advertising fatigue is a palpable reality for the vast majority of Internet users. For marketers, this saturation makes it easier to engage their target audience.

This is were programmatic advertising comes in. By automating the purchase of advertising spaces, it makes it possible to target the right people with the right messages, at the right time and on the right channel.

In this article, we take a closer look at the benefits and challenges of programmatic digital advertising. We share the best practices for getting to grips with this marketing tool, and focus on gamification in programmatic advertising.

SUMMARY

What is programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising is a method of buying and selling online advertising space.
It relies of the use algorithms and automation technologies to deliver ads in a more targeted and therefore more effective way.

Rather than negotiating manually with a publisher (as is the case in traditional marketing), advertising space is purchased in real time on specialized platforms called DSPs (Demand-Side Platforms), often via automatic bidding. The best-know of these is Google Display & Video 360, which offers premium access to inventory from YouTube, Google Ads and other partner networks.

Programmed digital advertising is based on RTB (Real-Time Bidding), a process whereby each advertising impression is sold in milliseconds to the advertiser best aligned with the defined criteria.

The benefits of programmatic advertsing

Programmatic advertising fills many of the gaps left by traditional digital marketing methods. Here are the main advantages for advertisers.

Data hyper-targeting

Traditional marketing campaigns often rely on basic demographic data (age, gender, location), which limits the precision of targeting.
By integrating behavioral and contextual data,
 collected and updated in real time (such as searches or purchase history), programmatic advertising makes it possible to target ultra-precise segments. For example: “women aged 30-35 in Paris, looking for a stroller in the last 24 hours.”

Automated ad buying

Buying advertising space used to be a huge waste of time for marketers if they wanted to react as quickly as possible to market developments or buying trends.

Thanks to automation, campaigns can be adjusted in real time to maximize results. Brands can, for example, create automations to increase bids on high-performing locations.

Optimizing advertising budgets based on ROI

Before programmatic advertising, marketing budgets were often allocated to channels without any real tracking of performance, which could lead to a misallocation of ressources.
Campaign performance is now optimized on an ongoing basis. Algorithms automatically reallocate the advertiser’s budget to the most effective channels or locations, guaranteeing a better return on investment.

Overall, this lever also makes it easier to measure KPIs (such as impression rate or CPC, or Cost per Clic),
not just athe end of a campaign, but in real time. Based on metrics such as click-through, impression and conversion rates, advertisers can immediately adjust their settings.

A larger advertising inventory, instantly accessible

Last but not least, programmatic advertising gives advertisers access to a much wider range of advertising space.With a single point of entry, they can broadcast their message on a multitude of platforms (retail media websites, mobile applications and even connected TVs).

The main challenges of this marketing lever

Despite its many, advantages, programmatic advertising is not without its challenges. To maximize its effectiveness, it’s crucial to identify its main challenges.

1. Measuring campaign effectiveness

The multiplicity of platforms and channels makes it difficult to accurately measure the performance of programmatic campaigns. Especially when it comes to conversion attribution (i.e determining which channel or interaction actually led to a new sale).

To accurately assess the performance of your companions, it’s important to equip yourself with advanced analytics tools and use tracking pixels to better attribute each conversion.

2. Advertising fraud risks

Fraudulent impressions (bots, fraudulent clicks, false views) cost advertisers billions every year. These activities
 artificially inflate campaign performances while having no real impact on ROI. It is therefore crucial to integrate anti-fraud tools such as
IAS (Integral Ad Science) or DoubleVerify, which detect and block fraudulent activity in real time.

3. A coherent brand universe

With programmatic advertising, ads can sometimes appear on sites or alongside content that is not consistent with the brand’s universe, or is even inappropriate.
This has a direct impact on reputation and buyer confidence. To avoid this, brands can activate exclusion lists (also known as blacklists) and define sensitive categories to to be avoided in their DSP.

4. Targeting and RGPD

With data privacy regulations (such as the RGPD in Europe), ad targeting has become more complex. Third-party cookies, once essential, are now on the way out. Without
<a href="https://www.adictiz.com/en/blog/why-collect-data/
“>a data collection strategy respecting user’s privacy
, marketing campaignd run the risk not only of violating current regulations, but also of being less effective. That’s why it’s so important for advertisers to switch to a
approach based on first-party data (collected directly form buyers), wich offers greater control and compliance.

Alternatives to cookies include the server-to-server approach (S2S) allows data to be transferred directly beteen servers, without relying on storage on the user’s browser. This method improves data security and limits the loss of information due to browser restrictions.

In addition, universal identifiers (such as Unified ID 2.0) offer an alternative by enabling pseudonumized, consenting tracking of users across multiple platforms.

Finally, contextual targeting, which is based on the analysis of content viewed rather than past user behavor, is enjoying renewed interest as a privacy-friendly solution.

5. Relevance of advertising creations

Today’s buyers are much more sensitive to personalized communications.
They expect brands to understand their needs and make ultra-targeted product recommendations. But automating the delivery of campaigns can dilute the message or undermine brand consistency.

To preserve the coherence of their brand universe, advertisers can nevertheless use a Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) tool. This allows them to automatically personalize their ads according to the profile and context of each user.

3 best practices for getting started with programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising offers great potential for advertisers, but it can also be quite complex to get to grips with. Here are 3 best practices for taking your first steps, with a focus on the us of gamification (i.e. the introduction of playable mechanics) to optimize performance.

1. Using gamification to refine customer knowledge and targeting

Playable advertising allows you to engage users and collect valuable data on their behavior and preferences at the same time.
By integrating game elements into programmatic advertising, advertisers can better understand what each audience likes based on events that come up (e.g. X users clicked on product A, and X users clicked on product B), what motivates their engagements, etc.

Restaurant chain Del Arte often uses gamification elements in its programmatic campaigns. For example, it integrates interactive quizzes to help audiences discover ho the pizzas sold in its restaurant are made.

programmatic playable ads del arte

2. Using first-party data for more precise and ethical targeting

The use of first-party data is crucial, especially with the new regulations on online privacy. This data, collected directly from users, makes it possible to
optimize campaigns without relying in third-party cookies, while respecting privacy.

Nike has perfectly integrated the use of first-party data by leveraging its mobile applications to collect information on users’ purchasing and sports habits. Using this data, the brand can create personalized programmatic ads that target customers with products that precisely match their sporting activities or style preferences.

3. Create differentiating and contextual advertsing messages

For programmatic campaigns to be effective, message must not only be personalized, but also relevant and adapted to the context of use. The use of Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) enables advertisers to create ads taht adapt in real time to the user’s profile and browising context, thus increasing the chances of conversion.


The Spotify platform uses programmatic advertising based on listening context, adjusting advertising messages according to the time of day and the musical genre the user is listening to. For example, an advert for an energy drink might appear when listening to dynamic music, while an advert for a premium subscription will generally appear at the end of the day.

Conclusion

Getting started with programmatic advertising can be a real challenge for your marketing teams. Don’t panic: the right tools and the gamification reflex, you can not only better understand and target your audience, but also maximize the impact of your campaigns by offering a more memorable and engaging brand experience. Find out how Adictiz can help you turn your programmatic campaign into real conversion levers!

In 30 minutes, we show you how to launch your own high-performance interactive marketing campaign

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