$1m Prize To Incentivise WebUsers To Scour Advertisers Sites

A new marketing concept is to be launched during June which represents a world first for the online advertising industry, with web users required to search participating advertisers’ sites as part of an innovative web-based game and race to win $1m.

The Golden Jigsaw is believed to be the first online jigsaw where pieces are purchased by advertisers and placed in their site as code. Web users that sign up to ‘play’ the jigsaw game must scour participating websites for the pieces and the participant that finishes the jigsaw by collecting and placing all 1,000 pieces first will win the financial prize.

Users sign up to play the game at www.goldenjigsaw.com, where they download a ‘jig-board’ to their desktop in order to begin playing. The Golden Jigsaw will release a steady stream of clues as to the potential location of jigsaw pieces throughout the duration of the game and, once users have located a new piece, they simply drag and drop it onto their jig-board to allow them to position it correctly at their convenience.

The project is likely to last between six and ten months, depending upon the speed at which clues are issued. The site will launch to advertisers in early June and will fully launch to web users on July 20th 2007.

The Golden Jigsaw has been devised to specifically appeal to web-marketers that have become frustrated with the many online strategies that deliver web-traffic to a site without encouraging any interaction with that site thereafter. The pieces will increase in price to advertisers as the project develops, with the initial pieces on sale for $120 (approx £60) each then rising progressively. The final pieces are estimated to sell for $11.700 (approx. £5,800) each. This strategy will allow both small, fast moving advertisers and larger, more established advertisers to participate whilst representing value for money to both parties as the most expensive pieces will be less than the cost of one typical magazine insertion.

The image used for the jigsaw it taken from The Ultimate Alphabet, a book of 26 fantastical illustrations by British artist Mike Wilks, which was originally published in 1986. Each picture contained hundreds of items that began with the appropriate letter of the alphabet and the book was also a marketing first as it launched with a competition, offering £10,000 to the first person able to correctly list all the items in the book. The illustration used is the letter ‘S’ – reputedly one of the trickiest in the book and featuring more than 1,700 items.

The Golden Jigsaw is the first concept brought to market by idea creation and implemention specialist Infinite Ideation Limited.

Julian Hanford, founder of Infinite Ideation, commented:
“We believe that Golden Jigsaw is an idea which is long overdue, not simply because it’s a blend of virtual jigsaw and online treasure hunt, but because it does far more for online marketers that want users to really explore and interact with their website than SEO or traditional web-marketing has ever done. The key to the project is the fact that the jigsaw is fiendishly addictive. The majority of us have done jigsaws in the past and can therefore recall the satisfaction of building the board up piece by piece over time, and the compulsion to finish. Clearly the financial reward for finishing first will incentivise many players but I firmly believe that this event will spread virally on the strength of the gameplay alone”.

“From an advertiser’s point of view, most current internet marketing is akin to bringing a visitor to stand outside a high street store. What the Golden Jigsaw does is commit that visitor to entering and fully experiencing the merchandise in the store, and I think it is obvious which visitor is more likely to become a customer.”

Al Tepper, Head of Marketing at www.naturalcollection.com, the Observers’ Online Ethical Retailer of the Year 2006, and one of the first to commit advertising to the project added: “As an advertiser it is becoming ever more challenging to differentiate our site from the competition. The real beauty of this project is that it encourages users to explore, which is ideal for an e-commerce site such as ours as customers literally have to look amongst our products in order to find the pieces and progress. By getting onboard early we also feel that we have got a bargain in terms of the cost of involvement.”

Tony Killeen, Founder and CEO of Allpay.net, added:
"Golden Jigsaw is a really interesting concept and what enticed us to become one of the first advertisers was the fact that webusers that want to play the game will be forced to explore our site to collect additional pieces. Unlike the majority of other forms of online marketing, which simply deliver traffic to our site, Golden Jigsaw demands user interaction in order to progress."

For more information, visit www.goldenjigsaw.com.

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