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The Challenge To help Topps create a game and sweepstakes web site that would be legally compliant with the Children's Online Privacy and Protection (COPPA) Act. Topps did not want game play to be overly complicated. Although it wanted data on its child audience, it did not want to disappoint or give the child a bad experience if the parents did not give their permission for the child to enter. The site also needed to be open to all ages, but geared mostly to children in order to showcase Topps products using the buzz surrounding the Speed Racer movie. The experience had to be easy and fun so children would come back to play again. The Solution Game developers were guided to build the game site to be compliant with COPPA and the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) guidelines. Age screening was put in place at the outset of the game and reasonable efforts were made to prevent a user from changing his/her age per CARU standards. Three different paths of game play and sweepstakes entry by age were developed so users could play the games immediately without gathering unnecessary personal information and compromising privacy. Game plays were tracked for future possible sweepstakes entries. For children 6 to 12, personally identifying information was not gathered until parental permission was obtained to be in line with legal requirements. Users were allowed to play as many times as they wanted but capped sweepstakes entries at 6 per day to encourage kids to return the next day. The Results The site had significant traffic, with 12.7 million total visits and 4.9 million unique visitors. The games were easy to access for all ages, with almost 19 million total game plays, and registered users playing an average of 14 times each. Children were the primary site visitors, with 88% of users age 20 or younger and 80% age 15 or younger. As expected, there were more game plays from children who did not gain permission to enter the sweepstakes than there were from those who did, but all users got to enjoy the games, and the client obtained valuable information on the approved sweepstakes users to be used for future promotional planning.