So, I was out at lunch today and I saw a group of women dressed in stewardess uniforms passing out info about a new contest Orbitz was sponsoring. Here's the short version:

- The first group of people to get 300 people to sign up, got a free trip for the whole group (both flight and 3 days hotel).

The catch is that each person can only invite 2 people per day. So, the thinking goes that it may take some time to invite enough people to fill this up (150 days if 1 person is inviting and gets 100% response rate).

But a second thought (literally, it takes you a second to figure this out), shows that all it takes is 8 'turns' to get to the goal of 300. 2^8 is 256 but you start with 2 already (since person 1 can invite 2 to kick things off, assuming 100% conversion). Also, the more turns you're into the game the easier it is as you can have some invitations not convert and you still have dozens of other 'live' invitation lines. Probably the first 3 turns are critical, and after that you're pretty save with a non-perfect invitation conversion rate.

So, the question is 'how long does 8 turns take?' Interestingly, in this wonderful age of the interweb, 8 turns can go REALLY fast. The contest kicked off this morning 12:01am CT, and by the time anyone realistically got this going, it was probably at least 8am CT. It was pretty much done by 6:30pm CT, around 10 hours later.

All in, under 5,000 people participated in the contest. Probably a lot more would have participated, but the thing went by way to fast.

The cost of this was probably nearly $500k (if not more - comment if you have a better estimate). Just a plane full of people, 3 days hotel stay for each, and the huge advertising agency overhead that went into creating this and pitching it, people to hand out flyers on the street (by the time I got a flyer in San Francisco, the contest was over already!) costs you around that much.

That means that Orbitz paid $100 per sign-up! Sure, they may not have borne the whole cost (partners may have kicked for the flight, hotels, etc.), but nevertheless however you want to value a "positive branding experience" on the web, etc, its unlikely that $100 per person has anywhere near a positive ROI...

Just thought it was a good example of a contest that wasn't very well thought out. Perhaps no one took the time to do the math, or question the basic logic behind it. Or maybe they did, and figured it could be won within the same day it launched, but that would still confuse me as to how this all makes financial sense... Would love to hear from one of the marketing team members at Orbitz or from the ad agency in the comments. I could be missing something big.

For that, Orbitz and its ad agency (Mass-based Mullen) get a ROYAL FAIL for this contest!

Thanks to Romiphoto from flickr for this picture

Disclaimer: I fell for this contest myself, inviting a bunch of friends to join me (I under-estimated how fast someone else would see the loophole and win before me). So, I was one of those people that Orbitz et al paid $100 to have a branding opportunity to...