By John Toth
The Bulletin
A few weeks ago, we received a contest entry in the mail from Andrew Cromwell of Lake Jackson for a Festival of Lights at Moody Gardens promotion.
Moody Gardens has been partnering with us for over a decade, which allows us to give away to readers a lot of tickets to those attractions. Andrew decided to enter the ticket give-away contest for Festival of Lights, Ice Land and the 3D and 4D theaters.
It was a great promotional package. The only problem was that Andrew’s entry coupon was postmarked on Dec. 2, 2022.
It took a while for the letter to reach us. Maybe it got stuck in a corner at the post office. Maybe the letter carrier dropped it on the floor of the delivery truck, and they just found it. Either way, it finally made it to its destination, almost two years later.
This is the first time we have received an entry coupon this late. Usually, some arrive a few days or a week late. A lot of the entries are emailed now, which speeds things up and eliminates the cost of a postage stamp.
There is no phone number or email address on the entry form. The writing style indicates that Andrew is on the elderly side of life.
We feel bad, even though this was not our fault, and have decided that Andrew should not be penalized for the Post Office’s mistake.
So, Andrew, if you call our office at (979) 849-5407, we are going to honor your coupon and award you two passes for an upcoming Moody Gardens promotional project on which we’re now working.
It won’t be as elaborate as the 2022 offer but will include the Festival of Lights.
It’s one of the upcoming ticket give-away packages in the works at The Bulletin. Check with us every week to see what’s coming.
We’re now in the middle of the Texas Renaissance Festival ticket-give-away contest. Winners will be announced in the Nov. 5 paper.
(There is no paper on Oct. 29, the fifth Tuesday in October. We’re off researching stories and column ideas, as we do every month that contains five Tuesdays.)
Partnering with venues to give our readers a chance to win allows us to give away thousands of dollars worth of tickets each year. It’s a lot of work both on the deal-making and production end, after which we randomly select winners and mail them their prizes.
We do it because it’s good business and rewards our readers, and also because we’re not really the newspaper type of paper. We don’t print news that you can read daily. We stick to a different niche that has worked for us well over the decades and allows some of our readers to experience an event that perhaps otherwise they would or could not attend.
We have had only one mishap over the years. Earlier this year the production company that we partnered with to give away Baby Shark tickets, pulled the show from the Fort Bend County location that we contracted with. They did this after we already announced the winners.
We have located two of the winners and have sent them tickets to an alternate show in Houston. We’re still working on finding the rest. I think there were two or three more.
We have had good luck with the free ticket promotions, but our very first promotional giveaways had their ups and down.
A few decades back, we ordered a couple of cases of Bulletin coffee mugs and started running contests to give away two mugs a week.
It was pretty popular. We mailed the mugs to the winners, who actually had to do some work to win. Today, we just ask you to fill out the coupon and send it in. Back in those days, we asked a question that had to be answered correctly. This was before the Internet took off and you could not just push a button to get the answer.
Most of the questions were not that hard, and we had several readers who answered them correctly. We randomly selected the winners from the current answers.
I was taking a graduate philosophy class on Shakespeare and came up with a horrible idea for a question. I can’t remember what it was, but it had to do with one of Shakespeare’s less popular plays.
We received a half-dozen entries, and only two were correct. We didn’t have to randomly choose the winners that week. That was our last Shakespeare question in the paper.
We stopped the contest because we thought we ran out of mugs, but a while ago we discovered that we still had the better part of a case left. Everything on the mugs is still correct, except for the area code of the phone number. It was 409 back then.
Maybe we’ll do the Bulletin mug contest again and give away the rest of the mugs, except for the one I use to scramble my eggs in.
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