By Michael F. Carmichael
March 18, 2010
It used to be if you wanted to win a lifetime supply of Cheerios or a new car you had to fill out a form with your name and address, send in a specially-marked boxtop or something similar and hope for lightning to strike.
That was the way it was for years. Until 1999, when lightning struck Josh Linkner.
That was the year he founded ePrize and brought sweepstakes and other promotions online and changed the way marketers and customers interact.
1999 was when companies were jumping on the dot-com bandwagon and many of them fell off not long afterwards. How did Linkner and ePrize not only stay on, but catch the brass ring?
“First of all,” he replies, “we had a real business model that met a real business need. A lot of companies were doing things that were consumer-facing and didn’t make that much of an impact online. In our case, we really helped reinvent an industry. The promotion industry was an old school, good-old-boy network and we really shook it up. We took it online and changed the model – which benefitted our customers.”
ePrize today works with 77 of the top 100 marketers and most have been repeat customers for years. If you want a lifetime supply of Cheerios or a new General Motors car you go online, fill in the required information and discover somewhere in the fine print that the sweepstakes is managed by ePrize.
With sweepstakes and other promotions showing up everywhere – even the popular “Who Do You Think You Are,” an NBC television program that follows celebrities as they track their ancestral roots, has a sweepstakes run by ePrize for the sponsor Ancestry.com – Linkner has tapped into a basic human trait.