I’ve just started planning my wedding and in going through the wedding magazines, found an ad promoting a contest to win a Honeymoon in Barbados from Sandals resorts. My fiance and I decided to enter for fun – why not? With all the other expenses, why wouldn’t we try to enter a romantic-hassle-free honeymoon contest. Yeah I know I’m a perfect sucker for all the upcoming marketing my way as I plan my big day.
I read him out the url and continue flipping pages, until I hear, “Uh sorry honey, we can’t enter this, it’s only open to U.S. residents.”
I flip to the front of the magazine and see that I am looking through a Canadian magazine, not an American one – so what gives?
Obviously a big resort like that has several ads and marketing campaigns running in magazines all over the world. Most companies have several different ads promoting either contests and/or other items specific to either the marketing vehicle they are using to promote their product, or to the country and/or region. Not everything will be open to everyone, everywhere. I know that, you know that, everyone knows that – but talk about a huge marketing gaffe. The carrot was dangled right in front of our noses and like good consumers we took the bait.
I know I can’t be the only one who tried enter that contest – how many of us Canadian Brides-to-be are now annoyed with that resort because they didn’t actually target their advertising properly. If they can’t run an ad that speaks to me as a Canadian – why would I want to contemplate staying at their resort?
On the plus side, I just proved to myself and all of you reading this that offline really does drive online 
Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) is a freelance web marketing/analytics consultant with more than seven years of direct experience helping businesses create and implement online marketing and communications strategies. Her clients come from all industries including finance, technology and not-for-profit. She specializes in helping her clients determine how to improve their advertising programs, focusing on visitor behaviour – beyond the inital click-through. Full bio available
Congrats on your engagement! I understand your frustration with the misdirected ad placement- someone spent a lot of money pointlessly! I wanted to point out though that Sandals does not have a resort in Barbados. So it was either a different company or perhaps a contest for the Sandals resort in the Bahamas.