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By: Dinko Bacun
The sweepstakes is an old marketing tool everybody is using. If
you need to introduce a new product, or you need to give your
sales a boost, you use the sweepstakes. Usually, you will have a
drawing from the pool of your buyers, and each week, or month,
you will draw some winners, either by some computer algorithm
or hand of some beautiful or famous person.
The problem with the sweepstakes concept is that everybody is
using it, so that a particular sweepstakes promo gets
indistinguishable, and the participant knows, from previous
experience, that his/her chance of winning are slim. Lottery
type drawing is impersonal, it has no content, and always leaves
the taste of possible fraud with the people who didn't win.
The main object of sweepstakes, which is to bring more buyers,
is thus losing its power in web marketing. On the web everybody
is talking about content and learning experience, so, for our
10th anniversary we thought of giving the old lady a new look.
Being IT developers, we knew we had to give the participants
a better chance to win, while still be in the range of
acceptability for us. We understood that the chance for a
participant to win should be bigger at the beginning, so that it
should nudge him to participate (buy our product) early. In
mathematical terms, we should be using such a DISTRIBUTION,
which will give the participant a big chance to win early,
while still giving a fair chance of wining later on. We decided
on prime numbers distribution, mostly because of a catchy
name, i.e. we could say that our sweepstakes were "primed".
The distribution would be implemented in such a way that every
buyer would get an unique, sequential ID number, when he buys.
If his ID number is a prime number, he wins the sweepstakes.
The distribution of wins is really appealing to the participant:
54% chance of winning in the first 11 buyers
45% in the first 20
26% in the first 100
16.9% in the first 1000
12.3% in the first 10000
So, for any sales over 100, we would be in the regular range
of standard 25% opening discount everybody gives away. On the
other hand, even if the participant isn't among first 100 buyers,
he stands a fair chance to win because even high numbers like
9923, 9929 and 9931 are primes. More importantly, the participant
has a feeling he can control the wining because he can increase
his chances if he buys early, which is, of course, the main
purpose of the sweepstakes.
We designed a page ( http://www.CarpioHelpdesk.com ) and showed it to
some of our friends, and we were surprised to learn that most of
them didn't really know what prime numbers were, and felt we
were feeding them some kind of "get $90,000 in 14 hours flat"
scheme. We then realized we were on the Net, and that we should
add "content" to our sweepstakes, the participants should be
able to learn something new, should learn about the importance
of prime numbers in computer industry.
So, what's so important about prime numbers?
K.F. GAUSS, one of the fathers of modern mathematics, in his
Distquisitines Arithmeticae, Art. 329(1801) says that
distinguishing prime numbers from composites (non prime) is one
of the most important and useful problems in whole of
arithmetics. Donald E. Knuth, one of the fathers of computer
programming, calls the prime numbers "somewhat MYSTERIOUS" and
says it will be necessary to develop new mathematical properties
to fully understand their distribution.
First of all, what is a prime number?
A prime number is an integer greater than one which can be
divided only by one and itself. One, two and three are primes.
Four isn't, because it is divisible by two. Five and seven are
primes, while six (divisible by two and three), eight (divisible
by four and two) and nine (divisible by three) are not.
Prime numbers play an extremely important role in mathematics
and are used in numerous calculations (most known are factoring,
greatest common divisor, linear equation solving, etc.). But
perhaps the most important quality of prime numbers is the
simplest one: any number grater than one may be written as a
product of prime numbers.
But their real importance for the computer world became evident
around 1977, when R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman
discovered a way to encode messages in such a way that the
code would be almost impossible to break even if the method
of encoding was public, i.e. known to everybody.
In very simple terms, if you have a secret code (number), and it
is written as a product of two prime numbers, then you can make
public the method of encoding, and the number (public key), while
the the factor is kept secret. Sound familiar? Remember PGP? So,
how secure would be such an arrangement?
It would be easy to generate a prime number of about 120 digits,
as it would take only about 90 comparisons using modern
algorithms. Generate another prime number of 130 digits, and you
would end up with a key of 250 digits which would be the
security code. Prof. Donald E. Knuth in "The Art of Computer
Programming" Vol.II page 388 analyzes how long would it take to
break such a security code. If we knew of a method to find factors
of a 250 digit number in one tenths of a microsecond (which is
what the FLOPS term is all about), we would need about 10 to
the power of 25 microseconds (that's a big number of microseconds:
one followed by twenty five zeroes) to find all the comparisons. As
there is only 1,556,952,000,000 microseconds in a year we would
need more than 3 x 10 to the power of 11 [300,000,000,000] years
of CPU time to find the answer. If there were a government agency
which would try to decode the message, and it purchased ten
billion computers and set them all to work on such a problem,
it would still take them 31 years to crack the security code into
factors. So if you published the security code (public key) and
also the method of encoding, but kept secret one of the factors
you would still be pretty secured.
Understand why all the fuss about PGP (which stands for Pretty
good privacy)?
Understand the importance of prime numbers?
So, the old lady is getting a new fresh look. It seems far more
interesting than the lottery style sweepstakes. The participant
seems to control his chances, and the cost for over 1000 buyers
is even less than the regular opening discount everybody gives
away. We just added content, i.e. we let the participants learn
something new, which is what the web is all about.
I guess the point of this article really is: you shouldn't throw
away the old marketing tools that worked well for so many years.
You just have to make them content rich, give them a new twist.
About the Author
Dinko Bacun
CEO of Tendriks d.o.o.
dinko@tendrix.com
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