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Donuts Anyone?
When we ran the contest back in 1998 we had a idea there would be a few visitors but we got a big surprise. We had up to 1000 people per hour from the local area sitting on the web site waiting for the cop to come in the drive thru. We ran the contest for 2 months and it was the best advertising we had ever done. It produced more then 500 new customers per month and caused a bunch of people to get involved in a contest we felt was going to be middle of the road. As I met with a marketing guru 2 months ago we had sat and chatted about advertising that worked and the Donut shop cop came back to life.
We had been looking for a way to bring customers to our new products that we had been offering on the net www.nostingkypits.com & www.growumgreen.com these products needed to get out to the public and get know we felt this could be accomplished with donutshopcop.com. as we had a list of emails that I had collected from jokes friends and family had sent me I sent out a email inviting them to have a look and see if they wanted to join and play the game.
After I sent out a total of 1500 emails personally addressed we got a whopping 85000 hits. It may have to do with the fact of offering win your weight in donuts. Also the fact is when the friend who you referred wins you also get the same prize. This month we are doing some test advertising for a company in Cambridge. It seems to be going ok and people are hitting the site just fine.
Some of the equipment we are using for this can be bought off the shelf if you have the desire to set this up. We used a ATI all in wonder pro for capture. For the camera we used a Samsung video cam on a video cable back into the card. The computer is a old p3 500 with 128 megs ram on Windows XP. The cam software is Webcam32 it is a breeze to setup. It pushes a still back to the server every 60 seconds. It all sits on a cable connection for a local business. There are from 3 to 9 cop cars in the donut shop each day and your chances of winning are high.
For the first win we give them a Tee shirt and some product samples with all names going into the draw for the monthly prize. We plan to offer bigger and better things as we go along. Internet access (1 year DSL connection), lease on a car for a year, boats , bikes and other products as we get rolling all it takes is a little imagination and the sky is the limit.
On our next venture we are going to setup other cams in fast food places and it may be a cop or who knows !!!!
The cam is setup on the Tim Horton's in Waterloo Ontario Canada.
Looking for help or more info you can contact me directly
Richard Willis owns and operates Donutshopcop.com he also owns and operates Puterdudes a full computer service company. he has been in the computer business for the last 17 years involved with different companys and projects.
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