Dickies Worker of the Year

Challenge:

Dickies is a world-renowned clothing manufacturer especially popular with blue collar workers and X-Games fanatics in the United States. For their annual "American Worker of the Year" contest ( http://www.workeroftheyear.com/ ), they needed to greatly increase the number of participants over the 2009 program to help remain the #1 champion of American blue collar workers.

Solution:

Their advertising agency developed a strategy that tied in participation from Sears and Kmart via POP signs and website banners. The agency then contacted MRI to help them carry out their online strategy, which was to increase search engine optimization through HTML programming versus a Flash-heavy strategy. MRI was able to implement the creative, build out the site, test, and get approvals from all associated parties within the 2-weeks leading up to the promotion launch date.

Details:

Marketing Resources developed rules and contest criteria, registered and maintained PO boxes for winners list and rules requests, managed all aspects of judging, winner validation, 1099 tax forms, and prize redemption.  MRI managed customer service support (800#), and programmed and hosted website using client-supplied creative, including share-with-a-friend functionality.

Results:

Participation in the 2010 contest increased 10 times over the prior year, which thrilled the client.  However, this created a problem with the sheer amount of man hours it was going to take to organize, sort, and pre-screen that many entries.  MRI developed an online judging tool to pre-screen all of the entries and cut down on the judging process immensely. 

Client Scott B: "MRI brought us an online solution to help organize and judge the contest entries that literally saved us and our client days worth of work.  That kind of proactive solution-making is exactly why we work with MRI."