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A brand new Mercedes, priced to be entered more than once
VICTRI · PRIZE DRAWS · META

A brand new Mercedes, priced to be entered more than once

The car was not the cheap part. The ticket was, deliberately. Here is how we filled a draw that needed three times the buyers, and the rule we broke to do it.
55%
LOWER COST PER ENTRY
against their previous car draw, which was the benchmark to beat
+30%
MORE ENTRIES
on 42% less advertising spend than that previous draw
28 adverts
TESTED IN 38 DAYS
88% of the budget aimed at people who had never heard of them
THE BRIEF

The prize was a brand new Mercedes A-Class, with a substantial cash alternative for anyone who preferred it. There was nothing cheap about the car.

What was deliberately cheap was the ticket. Victri priced entry at less than a third of what their car draws normally go out at, to lower the barrier and let people take several at once rather than just one. It worked on that front, the average order came to more than four tickets.

But it changes the job on the advertising completely. At a third of the price you need roughly three times as many buyers to get to the same place, and you need every one of them before the draw closes.

THE APPROACH

We had a real advantage here. Victri's own team films fast, and they shot and delivered a batch of raw video quickly. Our job was to turn that into as many tested angles as possible, and find the ones that worked before the budget ran out.

Twenty eight different adverts ran across the draw. Urgency cuts for the closing weekend, straight sales pieces, product footage, and a set of deliberately understated hooks that sounded nothing like advertising at all.

HOW WE RAN IT
01
Test wide, then commit hard
Most of those adverts ran on very small budgets. The point was never to spread the budget evenly across twenty eight ideas, it was to find out cheaply which one people actually responded to. Twenty five of the twenty eight produced sales, and one of them went on to take around 40% of the budget on its own.
02
Cold audiences, deliberately
88% of the spend went to people who had never heard of Victri. With a cheap ticket you cannot lean on the people who already know you, there are simply not enough of them.
03
We broke our own scaling rule
Normally we move budget up in steps of roughly 20%, because doubling resets what the platform has learned. On this draw we doubled it, and then doubled it again into the closing weekend. The rule exists for accounts that run continuously. A draw with a deadline is a different animal.
04
Because urgency is the product
In this industry demand concentrates hard at the deadline. Holding to a rule that would have throttled spend at exactly the moment people were ready to buy would have been discipline for its own sake. We read the account and did the opposite of what our own playbook said.
THE RESULT

The Mercedes draw took 30% more entries than the previous car draw, from 42% less advertising spend, at less than half the cost per entry.

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