Halloween 2008
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Twitter friends may recall my tweets yesterday morning about a PR pitch I received that was actually relevant. It wasn’t perfect by any means; it was still clearly a mass e-mail, a bit too long and promo-speaky, and had a press release attached. BUT… it was for a photo contest from Capital One and Newsweek. I do occasionally write about photo contests on Snapshot Chronicles.
I have no idea whether the agency who sent the pitch just got lucky or did a decent job of blog targeting. After all, the volume game in PR counts on the fact that if you send enough pitches, you are bound to hit on a few. I also have seen a fair share of not-so-great pitches from the same agency over the past few years. However, I will give them the benefit of the doubt.
And tell you all about the photo contest. The theme for the contest is American Life, and the angle is that Capital One lets consumers personalize the image for their credit card. Online consumer votes from January 6 to February 6, 2009 will determine 50 semi-finalists and Newsweek Photo Editor Simon Barnett will pick the winners. The prizes are reasonable, but not excessive, and you can enter up to five photos per day. More details on the contest page.
Chances of winning? Pretty slim unless you really work at it, tag your photos properly and get out the vote. But is it pretty simple to enter; I did it quickly through the contest page and you can also enter through a Flickr group, which should make it dead easy.
Here are the photos I entered:
All the pictures were taken during our vacation in San Diego last April. The beach pictures were taken on Coronado Island and the water slide was at the resort. The giraffe is Ivan the 19 year old male at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. We went on one of the photo safaris where you actually go into the enclosures and feed the giraffes. It was tremendously special at the time, but even more so when we learned that Ivan died of old age about a week after our visit. More pictures from that day on Flickr.
[tags] halloween, Indiana Jones, photo contest, san diego, beach [/tags]