Category: Promotion Planning and Trends

Good Criteria for Judging a Contest

Fae Savignano, Senior Vice President and expert on all things promotional, weighs in on what good criteria are for judging a contest in her blog post for the month.

May 5, 2025

What is Promotional Marketing?

Promotion marketing is any message that includes an incentive to persuade the target audience to take immediate action, thereby driving some form of brand interaction that leads to a current or future purchase. Promotion is different from advertising and other forms of marketing in that the goal is to drive immediate behavioral change. Promotional marketing is an often-misused tool when placed into inexperienced hands. You must ensure that any promotional

May 4, 2025

Criteria for Judging a Photo Contest

Fae Savignano, Marden-Kane SVP, follows up on her “Good Criteria for Judging a Contest” blog with this closer look at photo contest criteria. I would like to expand the list of suggested Contest Judging Criteria as it applies specifically to Photo Contests to include updated entry methods, social media trends and promotional knowledge acquired in the past 2 years. Previously suggested Judging Criteria for a Photo Contest: Adherence/Appropriateness to Theme

May 3, 2025

The Difference Between Sweepstakes and Contests

Katie Blaney, one of Marden-Kane’s former Account Supervisors, explains the difference between sweepstakes and contests. If your company wants more information on either, give us a call at 516-365-3999. The words “promotion,” “sweepstakes,” “contest,” and “giveaways” are sometimes used interchangeably. However, there are a few very distinct differences between sweepstakes and contests. To start, the word “promotion” can be used to describe many different marketing tactics including Sweepstakes, Contests, Instant

May 2, 2025

What Makes a Good Promotional Campaign?

The art of marketing relies heavily on the various ways in which products, services, and even people are advertised and presented to the general public.

May 1, 2025

What is “Consideration” in a Sweepstakes?

Account Supervisor Cheryl Thornton contributed this post on consideration. Consideration has many definitions, but when it’s included in a Game of Chance such as a Sweepstakes, the promotion could be violating federal, state and local laws and regulations governing Sweepstakes and Contests. When a promotion combines the elements of (1) prize, (2) chance and (3) consideration, it is a Lottery. All lotteries, except those which are state operated are

April 29, 2025

5 Things To Know About Running an Instant Win Game

Marden-Kane is your source for custom or pre-built instant win games that can be used for your next promotion. Not sure what an instant win game is? Check out our demo, and read on for 5 things to know about them: What is an instant win game? An instant win game is a game of chance where a player finds out instantly if they have won a prize. The

April 27, 2025

Create a Successful Loyalty Program

This post on how to create a successful loyalty program was contributed by Account Coordinator, Cassie Alaimo. Have you ever thought about starting your own loyalty program, but you are worried it won’t be successful? Don’t know where to start? Well worry no more, the following is information that will help you get on the way to starting a successful loyalty program. Customer loyalty is hard these days with so

May 12, 2021

5 Ways to Run a Flawless Beauty Pageant

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, making any kind of beauty pageant subjective. It then follows that if you are having a beauty pageant, you must look at it as a contest, and in most parts of the world that means you will also need to have Official Rules for your contest, and predetermined criteria within those rules. If you want to run a beauty pageant here are

May 6, 2021

Run a Legal Pay to Play Sweepstakes

The newest promotion trend is to run a pay to play sweepstakes where you can earn entries with purchase. For many e-commerce providers, a sweepstakes with the chance at winning a high value prize can be used to boost sales or donations. Every dollar spent can earn an entry into the sweepstakes, and bonus entries can be earned for purchasing certain products or making a purchase at a certain time.

March 26, 2021