Internet Sweepstakes Pull In Contest Junkies
On-line marketers aren’t sending Ed McMahon to your door with a check yet.
But they’re running thousands of other contests and giveaways, offering everything from salami to Hawaiian vacations to entice you to visit their sites on the Internet’s World Wide Web.
Boxer shorts hooked Lisa Titus. Soon after discovering she could get on the Web for free through her local library, the Bloomfield Hills, Mich., homemaker won a pair of Joe Boxer shorts for her husband by submitting a valentine of 10 words or less to a People magazine Web site.
Her mushy message to her husband was among the top 50 valentines and was broadcast on the Sony Jumbotron in New York’s Times Square.
“Now if I could just get him to wear them,” Titus said.
A successful “sweepstaker” before she discovered the Internet, Titus also won a contest sponsored by Sweepstakes Online’s Cool 100 Contests home page ( http:/ /www.sweepsonline.com/ swpcool.html ).
She won a modem, the device that connects a computer to a telephone line, by submitting information about 120 other contests to the Web-based contest listing.
“It’s a really fun hobby, but you have to be careful not to become addicted,” said Titus, who’s still smarting from losing out in a contest for a Jose Cuervo-sponsored Hawaiian vacation. Contestants had to type their names and addresses on the Cuervo Gold Web page during halftime of the Super Bowl ( http:/ /www.cuervo.com ).
“I only entered that contest a couple of thousand times,” said the contest’s winner, Bob Trieger, who is just back from two weeks at the Hawaiian Prince hotel. The trip provided the perfect antidote to his snowed-in winter in Everett, Mass., he said.
The computer technician for Fidelity Investments is a self-described Net contest junkie. The biggest monkey on his back is the Riddler contest ( http:/ /www.riddler.com ).
Riddler is a fun house of puzzles, trivia quizzes and stumpers and is sponsored by a rotating pool of advertisers, including Sprint.
Trieger has won about $7,000 on the Riddler, but he’s not celebrating.
“It’s the only way I stay even with the bill collector,” Trieger says.
The explosion in marketing incentives has spawned several Web pages devoted exclusively to listing and promoting the giveaways, including the Cool 100 and the 4cyte Thread Treader ( http:/ /www.4cyte.com:80/ThreadTreader ).
Most Net contests are easy to enter and designed to attract as many people as possible.
Salami.Com, an on-line merchandiser of Italian food specialties, asks only for your name, address, phone number and e-mail address to enter you in a drawing for a free salami every month for a year ( http://www.salami.com ).
But you have to supply your own rye bread.