Top 6 New Year’s online contest ideas

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New Year’s Eve as a holiday is all about living your life by the expression, “When in Rome.” It’s the one night of the year when it’s encouraged to stay up late, to indulge, and above all, to play.

It’s a time of year when people are more receptive to new ideas, and brands or products that can help them evolve as a person.

This is why online contests and marketing games are such an effective marketing tool for engaging with audiences over this holiday. They’re interactive, and can be used to really connect and tell a branded story, or create a meaningful and memorable experience.

So if you’re looking for better marketing solutions to your New Year’s Eve campaigns, look no further, because we’ve got you set with our best ideas for adapting Drimify’s game engines to create compelling online contests.

1. New Year’s Wordle-in’ Eve (Wordle)

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Why not take the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve special broadcast format and adapt it to a word game for effective New Year’s marketing? Well, maybe not the format, but the highly recognisable naming convention, and make it Wordle.

People love Wordle, and other word games, so they’re an ideal communications tool to connect target segments to your brand in the run up to the new year.

Simply come up with three to five five-letter words that are relevant to your message, create clues and pop-ups that tie things back to your product, then have a leaderboard to crown the best “Wordler” in your audience.

What brands would this Wordle for? Booksellers, publications or content or news sites, or any other brand with a vaguely intellectual audience.

Can we make it “New Year’s Wordin’ Eve?” Create multiple word games using the Wordle and crossword game engines on Drimify, and connect them all with Drimify’s Dynamic Path™. Have levels unlock on specific dates in a countdown from Christmas to New Year’s, and create sustained engagement as your audience fights to climb the leaderboard.

2. Auld Lang Prize (Slot Machine)

The slot machine is a universally understood instant win mechanic you can use to reward and incentivise your audience.

Load it with entry-level prizes, mid-tier prizes, and one grand prize (the lure for participation), then configure the interactive content screens and data collection form to suit your aims. Are you looking for email signups? Product promotion? App engagement?

Whatever the goal, we’ve likely got a success story of another brand doing something similar that you can use as a blueprint.

3. New Year, New Crazy Tradition (Video Contest)

Throwing plates against your neighbours doors? Crazy Danes. A dip in the icy cold North Sea? Mad Scots… but New Year’s traditions go beyond geographical peculiarities.

Even down to individual towns and families, people get into the oddest habits to see in the New Year.

Does your family all run full pelt up to the top of the local peak to set a standard for the year? Does your neighbourhood engage in a massive water fight? How about “the Ba’” – a game taking place in Orkney, Scotland on Christmas and again on New Year’s, where all the men in town divide into two teams and fight to capture a ball (the ba’) and take it to a specific location to win. (It gets rough!)

Whatever the tradition, be it regional, or unique to families or individuals, invite your audience to submit videos of their craziest New Year’s tradition for a media contest.

Add a voting gallery to maximise engagement: A lot more people in the world like to watch and pick their favourites than like to put themselves out there and turn the spotlight on their own endeavours, but it takes both for a truly successful media contest.

Have your media contest to collect those willing to get involved and participate, but have a second experience in a connected voting gallery to ensure you maximise your reach.

4. Year Ahead Hot Takes (Survey)

This is a great online contest for sports brands. Sports publications, sports streamers, and even sporting goods stores if there’s a community aspect to their external communications.

The new year is a time for looking back and for looking forward, and this is as true in sports as it is in life, even if it’s mid-season for a lot of leagues.

Essentially, you put out multiple choice options for different categories in a Survey – each one a hot take, in that it’s not the most likely – and then invite your audience to submit theirs.

Feed your content machine: This is a great way to get user-generated content and use it as the basis for highly shareable, clickable articles. You can even interweave the mass hot takes with some from notable industry figures.

5. New Year’s Day Shootout (Football Game)

Another one that’s ideal for the sports-focused or sports-adjacent brands, but a more playful mechanic, in that you can invite participants to score as many penalties as they can inside the time limit.

Customise the keeper’s jersey and the advertising behind the goal, set an on-brand and thematically relevant video background, and enable your leaderboard – sports fans love to compete! (So let them!)

6. Big Fat Quiz of the Year (Interactive Quiz)

A year has passed, so you’ve got a year of trivia related to your community to create a compelling online quiz.

This literally works for any brand, and you could even make it general knowledge or news or pop culture-based for more variety. Enable a leaderboard, and set the tone to something like, “Who’s been paying the most attention this year?”

This more general approach could be ideal for a news outlet, or even a music or talk radio show. People love to show what they know, and they especially love to show that they know more than other people, so enable the leaderboard to make it a contest.

Really make it a Big Fat Quiz of the Year: If it works for your brand, and it works for your project, you could use Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ to create a multi-step experience made up of quizzes covering different topics. You could do music of the year, movies of the year, etc. etc.

Expert advice

Fundamentally, New Year’s is a time for celebration, reflection, and looking forward. It’s a time where people are open to diversion, and receptive to messages on new things – this makes it a great occasion to target with your marketing campaigns, and to make them even more effective with gamification in the form of online contests.

The ideas listed here can be looked at as jumping off points for your own campaigns, but there are also a whole host of game engines on the Drimify catalogue just waiting for you to adapt them to your branded story.

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