I just got this email from Virgin Media, asking me to Spot the Ball and win tickets to Euro football match.

Virgin Media spot the ball email

It’s a great idea, each box is a different link and only one of them is the winner. So presumably clicking a box submits the entry to your under your account and the landing page will not tell you if you guessed right or not, then at the end of the competition, they draw from those who chose right.

Of course there are a few ambiguities, which I hope Virgin Media thought of:

Someone, who really wants to win could click more than one or all boxes in the hope that the landing page will say “congratulations you’ve won!”.
That would invite cheating to an extent.
So Virgin might be fine with that, the more people in the draw the better or they may simple log the the last click. So every time they click it over writes the last click. This would also mean that the landing page should not tell the user if they are guessed right. Alternatively after the first click it could lock it down from their end and all future clicks go to a different landing page which tells them they have already entered. Finally whoever they do it, the links need to redirect elsewhere after the closing date.

I have clicked through, it asks me to login, I’ve forgotten my details because I so very rarely login, in fact my main interaction with Virgin Media (outside of the on Demand TV) is fending off telemarketing calls trying to sell me Blackberry phones from the nineties 🙂