Now a Movie Contest for People that have Actually, You Know, Seen the Movie

First off, let me thank everyone who came up to us at our table last night at the Washington County Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Banquet and Business Exposition last night. I was really pleased to learn more about your businesses and meet so many new people. We’ll do the actual drawing for the free portable DVD player today, but aren’t going to post the winner for privacy reasons. If you entered the contest, we’ll contact you to let you know whether or not you won.

Okay, the actual meat or meat-like substance of the post. A few days ago I wrote about We are Marshall‘s contest for best fan page, which will be created and judged *before* the movie comes out and people could, oh I don’t know, actually figure out whether they liked the movie enough to devote a fan page to it.

Now Sony is promoting a contest for The Da Vinci Code prior to its release on DVD. They have a special contest Web site and are partnering with Yahoo’s Movie and Travel properties. Fans can enter clues to win a trip to Paris; the contest runs through February 8th.

A good contest all around it seems as far as contests go. They’re getting some free publicity and hopefully generating interest for fans to buy the movie when it comes out. By the way, if you’re ever running a contest for your company, be sure to put in rules about how often someone can enter. I should have learned that tip from Real Genius and Frito-Lay, but sadly I had to learn it the hard way from some jerk who designed a computer program to stuff the ballot box and won the grand prize.

What I’d really like to see, though, is a combination of the Marshall and Da Vinci contests. Have people that truly appreciate the movie devote Web space that will help drive traffic to your site and push sales for the DVD release. Or use something similar in having fans put up sites for an original in order to promote a sequel.

For you cynics, yes, the fan promotional information will still be somewhat contrived, but not nearly as much so. Especially if the prizes relate to the movie and are something true fans would really want to win.