Sweepstakes & Contests

Facebook Slop

For a little over a year between 2011—2012 I worked for a company producing sweepstakes and contest web apps. Mostly throw-away junk that would liter Facebook feeds at the time, between Farmville notifications. It was a breakneck-paced development-cycle where in 14 months I worked on no less than two to three projects a month. It wasn’t healthy or sustainable.

Despite the majority of these projects being what I would now fondly refer to as “Facebook Slop”, I did get the opportunity to work with some incredibly talented people and big name brands. A contest that I worked on for JCPenney & Van Heusen was advertised by Deion Sanders in commercials during Monday night football. A sweepstakes I worked on for AirHeads was advertised on candy wrappers. A commercial for a contest that I built for the The History Channel & TurboTax featured Chumlee from Pawn Stars doing his own taxes.

Some projects never saw the light of day. I pitched an all-pink pack of Starburst as a breast cancer awareness campaign with The Wrigley Company, but was told the machining to make a single flavor pack could not be done. I built a sweepstakes Facebook app for Turner and Chevrolet to give-away Andy Richter’s Orange Bullet, but the campaign was canceled at the last minute.

These web apps were all built using CodeIgniter. The fast-paced demands of this job were the reason that I started learning about programming design patterns, to help speed up my own development process. Many of these web apps required localization to support multiple languages, which CodeIgniter suported out of the box. Many security measures like IP address blocking and rate-limiting needed to be built to help keep these sweepstakes and contests fair. These security measures and things like dashboards, content moderation, and analytics reporting could be built once and deployed across multiple applications.