Looking Beyond the Bracket for a Unique Sports Promotion
Prize Indemnity Insurance from PPI makes it easy to create attention-grabbing promotions for the brands that you work with.
Popular sporting events, like say, the men’s college basketball tournament that’s about to get started are a great platform for successful promotions. These sporting events garner a good deal of the public’s attention anyway and promotions that are associated with them are a great way for brands to capture some of that attention and build their own exposure.
The most common college basketball tournament promotion is offering an insured mega prize to anyone who can pick the perfect bracket – correctly predict the winner of all sixty-three games. Of course, this is extremely difficult to do. That fact makes it an easily insurable risk. In addition, the concept of the perfect bracket is easy for the consumer to understand.
But there are downsides
One considerable downside of the perfect bracket promotion is that it has been done dozens, if not hundreds, of times over the past 20+ years.
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PPI has insured many perfect bracket promotions each year and we have never paid a claim on this type of policy. To our knowledge, no one has ever won a prize for accomplishing this feat.
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So how do you break out of the bracket?
If you ask us, rather than running another perfect bracket promotion, perhaps it is time to create a new concept. Maybe the large insured prize is offered to one contestant if a real long shot (13 seed or higher?) is one of the last four teams standing.
Perhaps the contestants who picked the most winners in the earlier rounds have the opportunity to win an insured prize if they can correctly predict the score of the final game.
The bottom line is that brands can stand out from the crowd by offering promotions with large insured prizes. PPI has the experience and creativity to help you produce successful and memorable promotions for the brands you work with. If it’s not college basketball, maybe it’s a NASCAR promotion or a pro football promotion.
My customers aren’t really sports people …
And if sports don’t work for your brand, there are plenty of creative ways to weave the excitement of a huge insured prize into whatever theme fits. The Oscars? Game of Thrones? We have a lot of ideas that we’re happy to share with you. We can help you create a compelling and exciting promotion that utilizes Prize Indemnity coverage that also fits the constraints of the brand’s budget.
Contact PPI at 888-407-5841, email us, or fill out our quick quote request to let us know what you’re interested in doing. We can help you make it happen.
Three Ways to Offer a $1 Million Prize for a Whole Lot Less
Three Ways to Offer a $1 Million Prize for a Whole Lot Less
By Jack Woodbury
“I want to offer a $1 million prize. How much will it cost me to insure it?”
At Prize and Promotion Insurance, we get asked this on a regular basis, but it is one of those inquiries that we never get tired of hearing. Mainly, we like the question because it begins a conversation that often leaves our customers happily surprised.
While the short answer to the question is “it depends,” let’s take a minute to dive in a little deeper.
The cost of prize indemnity insurance essentially comes down to a number of variables. So after a customer approaches us about insuring a large prize, we can start to save them money once we know these three things:
1. How much coverage do you need? (and how will you structure the payout?)
If the goal is to offer the attention-grabbing sum of $1 million, then that’s the answer. Many promotions, however, offer a $1 million prize paid over 20, 25 or even 40 years. Most of our customers don’t realize that offering a $1 million prize in this way reduces the amount you need to insure and can save them a lot on the cost of insurance.
2. How many people will have a chance to win?
Here’s another way you can really save some money. If the intent is to offer a large number of people the opportunity to win the insured prize, then risk of the prize being won is obviously much higher (and the insurance will be more expensive).
On the other hand, if the chance to win is limited to just one or maybe a few people (for instance a randomly chosen contestant wins if their entry happens to match the final score of the championship game), the risk is more limited and the cost of insurance will be considerably less.
But keep in mind that if you do limit the opportunity to win the insured prize to a small number of people, you’ll want to make sure you build in a good number of lower level, uninsured prizes that let consumers feel like they have a good chance at winning something even if it is not the chance at the insured prize.
3. What does someone need to do to win?
The way a promotion is structured is critical to our ability to judge the likelihood of a winner. If a person has to correctly guess an eight-digit number, the probability that the prize will be awarded is fairly low. On the other hand, if the contestant simply has to make a basketball free throw in order to win the prize, then the chances are much higher.
The challenge is to create a structure that is believable enough to create interest in the promotion and also difficult enough so as to be insurable at a reasonable price. Fortunately, PPI has been helping promotion creators strike this balance for decades.
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Offering a $1 million prize doesn’t need to cost you $1 million, or even close.
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Offering a $1 million prize doesn’t need to cost you $1 million, or even close. Along with these three basic questions, we can employ a host of other strategies to create prize promotions that generate excitement and buzz at a rate that usually puts a smile on the face of the customer.
And if, during our conversation, it seems like we’ve done this a few times before, it’s because we have. At PPI, our underwriters have decades of experience helping marketers create exciting insured promotions. If you’re interested in learning more strategies for insuring a large cash prize or another big-ticket promotion, feel free to reach out to me. I’d be happy to help you too.
Contact me at PPI by calling 888-407-5841, email us, or fill out our quick quote request to let us know what we can do for you.
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