I like competitions where there’s some skill or challenge involved, rather than the normal prize-draws or ones with questions that you’d need the IQ of a dead hedgehog to get wrong. Competitions that can’t possibly be solved by using the Internet are even better. That way you feel that you’ve got a decent chance of winning, or at least you’re likely to be up against less people.
All of which brings me to the Orange “win the ultimate party” competition, sadly the thrust of the competition seems to be to harvest peoples e-mails but, ignoring that, it appeals to me. It’s an easy concept: design a £50,000 party for 400 people, best party idea gets their party made real, it’s not got long to run (closes in January) and the bar is quite high as you need to register 400 e-mail addresses for your entry to qualify. I’m going to trust Orange not to be too spammy and say that that’s a fairly cheap cost to enter.
So, this should be winnable but how to do it? The spec says “creative and unique” and something that would “bring people together”. I think that rules out the stuff I can come up with off the top of my head, the medieval banquet, the Hollywood party, any time-period themed thing. You could go with an abstract theme (‘Stuff the begins with T’, or even just ‘Orange’) but I expect those angles are going to be pretty well covered so I don’t think there’s much mileage in that.
I’m guessing sucking up to Orange and figuring in communication heavily isn’t going to hurt. Hmmm, perhaps some mad multi-site thing? Some phone-based interaction? Something ‘mobile’ (see what I did there?). Gah, not as easy as I thought. Any ideas? Free invites to any commenters that want them (if I come up with a half decent idea).