6 Carnival online contest ideas for better Mardi Gras marketing
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Carnival can mean a lot of different things in lots of different parts of the world, but the headlines are: public parties, parades, pageantry, costumes, and excessive partaking in food and drink.
Historically, as the pre-Lent period, it’s a time for great indulgence, and as such, it creates a lot of commercial opportunities for businesses.
A great way to tap into the playful nature of the occasion is through gamification, specifically through marketing games and online contests.
To help you use games in a way that really maximises your Carnival marketing campaign’s impact, we’ve prepared a shortlist of our most on-theme online contest ideas using pre-made game engines from our Drimify platform. Ideas you can adapt and develop to easily build your own marketing experiences – with no expertise or coding experience required.
1. Carnival Costume Contest (Photo Contest)
Carnival was a manifestation of medieval folk culture which likely pre-dates Christian rituals. These often involved masks and dressing up in elaborate costumes, and this is an aspect that has carried on and evolved to the present day in many Carnival celebrations around the world.
Masks, costume parades, idiosyncratic characters to this Carnival and that Carnival – whatever your target audience’s version, you can capture this aspect of the festivities by customising your own photo contest.
The precise rules or terms of your costume contest will depend on your market, be it themed around “karolins,” “touloulous,” or elaborate masks.
Make it a contest: Connect a voting gallery and invite your audience to choose the winners! (Afterall, people are making their costumes to be seen!)
Depending on the scale of how Carnival is celebrated in your territory, you could go really big, and even have multiple categories.
The user-generated content (UGC) your contest will generate can then be used to further promote the contest and the voting gallery across social media.
2. Bead Blaster (Bubble Shooter)
In the late 19th century the tradition of throwing beads from parade floats started, and it’s one that’s stuck around and become an iconic aspect of the occasion. (Known as “Mardi Gras throws.”)
This makes customising a bubble shooter game into “Bead Blaster” a super on-theme way to create a Mardi Gras-themed online contest.
Customise the bubbles to resemble purple, green, and gold beads with your branding on, and invite participants to shoot together groups of three or more to smash them to pieces and boost their score.
Enable the leaderboard: By having a leaderboard, and hosting it on your website or within your loyalty app (or even a dedicated screen in your store or venue), you can stoke the competitive fires of your audience to drive up engagement.
You could even offer up Mardi Gras-themed prizes to your top performers, or have a prize draw among the customers who make it on to your leaderboard at the close of your contest (you can do this natively within your Drimify dashboard).
What sort of brands does this work for? Mardi Gras is most famous in historically French territories in the United States, and while it’s not a national holiday in the US, it’s become a huge deal globally. Ultimately, if it’s important in your market, this one’s an easy to customise online contest, perfectly coded to the occasion.
3. Mardi Gras Match Quest (Match 3)
Why not marry the chaos and excitement of a Mardi Gras parade with your own products and brand?
You can customise a match 3 game to include your own branded icons, along with more Carnival-themed icons or gems (like masks, and beads).
This is a marketing game using the mechanics of Bejewelled Blitz or Candy Crush Saga, but customised to your goals – be that through a data collection form for gathering demographic data and preferences, or intermediate content screens making customers aware of your products and services.
Use people’s competitive natures to your advantage: Much like with Bead Blaster, this is a point-scoring mechanic, so by enabling the leaderboard you can amplify how engaged people are in the outcome (and by extension, your branded messaging.).
4. Samba Scratch (Scratch Card)
Samba is THE dance of Carnival, so customise a digital scratch card with a visual or illustration of the Rio Carnival samba parade, and have your underlay reveal their Carnival-themed prize!
An ideal loyalty solution: Virtual scratch cards are a great way to add a more visual and engaging element to your loyalty apps, either to reward customers with big prizes, or to distribute promo codes, or highlight offers or new products associated with the occasion.
Samba not a big part of your market’s Carnival tradition? Whether you’re celebrating in South America, Stateside, Europe, or elsewhere, every iteration of Carnival is a visual spectacle which can translate to creating visually engaging scratch cards.
5. Pancake Man (Pacman)
In Britain specifically, Mardi Gras is replaced by Pancake Day – which comes with a very different vibe to Mardi Gras and other variations of Shrove Tuesday and Carnival.
The origin lies in using up all the leftover eggs, milk, and sugar before lent – a last chance to eat up all the rich foods before fasting. And that’s really the long and short of it. We make thin pancakes with some lemon and sugar (and they’re a lot better than that makes them sound).
To honour this aspect of Carnival and the pre-Lent season, but make it a bit less Oliver Twist, you can customise the mechanics of Pacman to become Pancake Man.
The hero character becomes your mascot (or a special mascot for the occasion), the collectible icons become pancakes, the power-up items become maple syrup jars, and the ghosts become waffles, or sentient bowls of muesli, or some other rival breakfast cereal.
Who is this for? “English” pancakes (the thin kind) are more of a homemade kind of thing, but fluffy American pancakes, with scrambled eggs and bacon and maple syrup, can be a real breakfast event at a restaurant, and this is something that has been successfully exported across the world.
Any restaurant across the globe promoting big fluffy pancakes could capitalise on Pancake Day – particularly in areas that observe Pancake Day but maybe haven’t tried American-style pancakes. Think IHOP, think Bill’s, think Frankie & Benny’s.
6. The Big Fat Carnival Quiz (Interactive Quiz)
The likes of Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween very much are what they are wherever you celebrate with subtle tweaks, but Carnival, as touched on throughout this listicle, is idiosyncratic to every location.
Challenge your audience to a Carnival trivia challenge and enable the leaderboard to see who has the best grasp of what Carnival means around the world.
Why would this work? This is a virtual pub quiz, and as Carnival is a festival that embraces indulgence, it goes hand in glove with the occasion! Use it to communicate offers, collect data, or as part of a Combo™ experience where you can link your quiz to an instant win game to distribute prizes and promotional codes.
Expert advice
Carnival might not be the first marketing calendar event most businesses are thinking about building their campaigns to target, but for retailers, hotels, restaurants, and cafes with venues in territories where Carnival is widely celebrated, it offers a lot of commercial potential.
It’s fundamentally about having a good time and letting loose. It’s a time when people are looking to be caught up in the spirit of the season, so tap into some of the power of that spirit with marketing games.
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