Need to Know Some Jungle Book Trivia, or 101 Dalmatians? They Do
by Evan Ramstad
AP Business WriterNEW YORK(AP) -- Bet the Hamburglar wishes he had a computer. Over the past month, people hungry for the $1 million cash prize McDonald's was giving away in a Disney trivia contest used the Internet to find answers to questions such as "In the Lion King, where is young Simba first presented to his future subjects?" (Pride Rock)
The effort probably cost McDonald's more cheeseburgers, Cokes and apple pie than it expected to hand out.
There's no way to know, though, because the company didn't keep track of how much food was given away and wasn't aware of the online answers, spokeswoman Julie Cleary said. The chain stopped giving out the game cards last week as scheduled.
The contest's only $1 million prize winner, a Nebraska teenager, got the right answer about black and white Mickey Mouse cartoons without using the Internet. (It turns out the card was a sure winner because all the scratch-off answers were correct.)
Nonetheless, the discussion groups and Web sites devoted to the contest demonstrate how information can be pulled together quickly and shared on the Internet, possibly upsetting the balance of power connected to that information.
They also show the advantage of having the resource, such as owning a computer or visiting a library with one, for getting online, even though the payoff this time may just have been a free Quarter Pounder.
Henri Poole, President of vivid studios, a San Francisco firm that has created online contests for various companies, said it illustrates an even larger truth about the data network's effect on society.
"Those people in the wired world are working together to get ahead of the people who aren't," Poole said. "What surprised us when we were doing our games was that people were so willing to share answers in the hope that someone in the collective was going to win a prize or gain some advantage over the people who weren't sharing."
Each McDonald's Disney question card had several possible answers covered by a scratch-off adhesive. If the right answer was uncovered, the person won a prize.
Shortly after the contest began last month, answers started appearing online in an unorganized fashion that is typical of the big data network.
For instance, 17-year-old Carson Evans started keeping track of answers from the game cards brought in by his co-workers at Neptune Interactive, an Internet access and consulting firm in Alexandria, VA. After several days of using legal pads, he decided to create a Web page and to solicit answers from people around the country.
"Everyone here in the office was playing the game. It was a big deal for people to try to remember the answers," Evans said. "The more I thought about it, the more I thought what a great Web page and the next thing I know I've got hundreds of people coming to my page every day."
About a dozen Web sites, chiefly administered by college students, have sizable answer lists to the contest, for which prizes are being redeemed through May. The biggest has answers to nearly 3,800 of the 6,000 questions McDonald's used.
In addition, Internet discussion groups devoted to Disney movies were taken over by people seeking contest answers. And an electronic mailing shared daily by reference librarians, called "Stumpers," was littered with requests for help in the contest.
Many people looked to public libraries for help.
"I first tried to collect a bunch of Disney books that would have answers," said Kelly Strom, a reference librarian at the Champaign, IL, public library. "If we couldn't answer them from the books, I looked them up on the Web. After awhile we just printed out all the answers and had them on the desk.:
Some people arrived at the library with a stack of question cards intending to spend several hours looking up answers and were amazed to find Strom had them, she said.
Her colleague Mike Regalla, a children's librarian who administers the library's Web site, created a special page devoted to the contest with links to the bigger Web databases that had answers. "It was just a way to create a rapid response to someone's needs," he said.
The Chatham-Effingham-Liberty public library in Savannah, GA, also created similar connections from its Web pages. "It was natural to put these links up to help our librarians as well as people who logged in from home," said Kim Morrill, the library's computer expert.
The online buzz now is that McDonald's plans a similar trivia contest for the Olympics. But Cleary said the company doesn't share information on upcoming promotions for competitive reasons.
A sample of the Web address with answers to the McDonald's Disney contest:
(vivid editor's note: These links are now inactive.)http://www.storms.com
http://www.uwm.ed/~radcliff/d/d.html
http://mason.gmu.edu/~spietruc/disney.htmlWant to read more articles?
Home | Search | Feedback | Projects + Vision | vividians
Form + Function | PR | Culture Shock | Vivid Travel Network