Oct 6, 2026 · 58 min · 16 segments
“Two of our winners have entered for free. They never purchased anything from us.” How did Ridge turn a 6-week Tony Hawk partnership into an 8-figure sweepstakes lift? Connor Rolain (Head of…
Connor MacDonaldGuestConnor RolainHost
Um, and I'm totally with you, especially if a brand's experiencing, like, relatively large growth over a couple years.
It's really easy for things like this to get lost in the mix, where it's like, what is the incremental growth unlocked by something like a sweepstakes campaign? Um, the way that we've looked at it in the past, I mean, we've run six of them at this point, and there's really, I guess, two types of comparisons that we're able to look at to sort of help justify the existence of sweeps or validate that it is truly contributing to incremental growth.
Not super, like, this is not, this is not rocket science, right? And we didn't do it for the purpose of measurement.
Um, but launching it a week early allowed us to say we've been growing at, I'm just gonna use standard numbers here, 10% growth year over year.
This week of sweepstakes is comping a week last year where we did not have sweepstakes.
So if we're able to go from 10% growth to 50% growth, I think it's pretty clear that the existence of sweepstakes is driving incremental revenue.
And the reason I bring that up is because if we've been running it six years in a row, it's actually really difficult to, to understand that, like, we have no holdout against sweepstakes.
That's why I like this as an example, is it's like we're looking year over year and we can treat last year's non-sweeps period as a sort of holdout.
What does the last week of July look like without sweeps compared to this year's last, last week of July?
Did-- Was that like a thoughtful approach literally just to get f- like for the sake of measurement? Or no, it just worked out that way?
So there was a year where we went from it being like five weeks to six weeks or something like that.
So it was more a calendaring decision or a campaign decision around just elongating sweeps, but it gave us the ability to have this like very fair comp year over year.
Um, and I'm totally with you, especially if a brand's experiencing, like, relatively large growth over a couple years.
It's really easy for things like this to get lost in the mix, where it's like, what is the incremental growth unlocked by something like a sweepstakes campaign? Um, the way that we've looked at it in the past, I mean, we've run six of them at this point, and there's really, I guess, two types of comparisons that we're able to look at to sort of help justify the existence of sweeps or validate that it is truly contributing to incremental growth.
Not super, like, this is not, this is not rocket science, right? And we didn't do it for the purpose of measurement.
Um, but launching it a week early allowed us to say we've been growing at, I'm just gonna use standard numbers here, 10% growth year over year.
This week of sweepstakes is comping a week last year where we did not have sweepstakes.
So if we're able to go from 10% growth to 50% growth, I think it's pretty clear that the existence of sweepstakes is driving incremental revenue.
And the reason I bring that up is because if we've been running it six years in a row, it's actually really difficult to, to understand that, like, we have no holdout against sweepstakes.
That's why I like this as an example, is it's like we're looking year over year and we can treat last year's non-sweeps period as a sort of holdout.
What does the last week of July look like without sweeps compared to this year's last, last week of July?
Did-- Was that like a thoughtful approach literally just to get f- like for the sake of measurement? Or no, it just worked out that way?
So there was a year where we went from it being like five weeks to six weeks or something like that.
So it was more a calendaring decision or a campaign decision around just elongating sweeps, but it gave us the ability to have this like very fair comp year over year.
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