Contests are a very popular and effective promotional tool. For its KitKat promotion, Nestlé again decided to get us on board to build on past successes. To make the contest as attractive as possible, it was clear to us that we wanted to collaborate with a partner who could bring tempting prizes along. What is very popular and fits the slogan "Have a break - have a KitKat”? Escape, take a break - travel! So we got to work on collaboration negotiations with travel.ch, the Swiss online travel agency.

We were soon able to find a common denominator between the needs of both partners, and the concept became clear: you can register online with codes printed on KitKats and, in this way, win great prizes such as holidays on dream islands, city breaks in several large cities, or vouchers for travel.ch.

The contest's microsite was to be established in Flash. Flash has the advantage that it brings no compatibility problems because it can easily be downloaded and used with any operating system, with the one exception of mobile devices. But since these are used more and more often to surf the Internet and particularly to visit pure consumer sites like these, it would mean a great loss were we not able to reach these numerous customers.

There was also the fact that, from an SEO technical perspective, Flash is extremely unfavourable, as all of its content, such as videos and other animations, is not found and displayed by the search engines. The site is thus practically invisible online.

We decided to rebuild the website in HTML5, as this would solve both problems.

Unlike Adobe Flash, however, HTML5 has massive compatibility issues. So it was now up to our web engineering department to make the website compatible for all the systems, from Firefox to Explorer, through to Opera and Safari. A challenging assignment. But despite the great effort made, we can very clearly say: HTML5 is preferable to Flash in such cases, without question. A page that the search engines don’t find and that cannot be used by mobile devices such as iPad, iPhone, or Android cell phones is useless from a marketing and popularity increase perspective. It is thus better to go with HTML5 for all such promotional microsites.

A contest of that size requires a well-organized back end, which, on the one hand, gives the customer Nestlé and us an overview and, on the other hand, protects against abuse. Our analysis program checks the received applications and immediately filters out invalid and incorrect name or address information, as well as postal codes from ineligible countries. If someone tries to hack code, the processor detects this and, to protect against abuse, immediately blocks the relevant IP address. Our customers and we can view all these details about valid and invalid logins as live statistics.

Not only did we carry out this project fully from A to Z and offer a sophisticated total solution, but we also did so within a very short time frame. The contest page, along with its entire organization, was thus ready for use after only one month; despite complications, the contest could be launched as scheduled.