Facebook contests are the dominant brand-engagement format on the platform right now, and a recent industry survey says 82.4 percent of them helped the running corporation hit a specific goal — fans, loyalty, or data collection. The number is right, the format is right, and the playbook is reasonably well understood at this point. The question for brands sitting it out is why.
A few contests have set the template for everyone else. Worth looking at what they did and why it worked.
The case files
Lay's Do Us a Flavor. Frito-Lay launched the U.S. version of its crowdsourced potato chip flavor contest in 2012. Customers submitted flavor ideas through a Facebook tab. The brand surfaced finalists, ran a public vote, and produced the winning flavor for sale. The first U.S. winner — Cheesy Garlic Bread — became a permanent SKU. Total entries across the U.S. campaign cleared 3.8 million. International versions of the contest have been running in the U.K., Australia, India, and a long list of other markets. The campaign is the single most-cited Facebook crowdsourced product contest in the marketing trade press.
Doritos Crash the Super Bowl. PepsiCo has been running its user-generated Super Bowl ad contest since 2007. Consumers submit finished 30-second spots. The brand picks finalists, runs a public vote, and airs the winning spot during the actual Super Bowl broadcast. Winning consumer-created spots have repeatedly outperformed agency-produced creative on USA Today's Ad Meter rankings — which is either an indictment of the agencies or a credit to the consumer participants, depending on which side of the table you sit on.
Coca-Cola Share a Coke. Coke's personalized-bottle program — printing common first names on the packaging and inviting consumers to find their name, photograph the bottle, and share with a hashtag — was piloted in Australia in 2011, expanded through Europe in 2012, and is being rolled out across more markets through 2014. The mechanic is structurally a sustained contest — find a name, share a photo, enter for additional engagement. The reach has been enormous.
Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" Twitter responses (2010). The campaign that proved real-time consumer engagement at scale could work. Not a contest in the formal sense, but the structural template for inviting consumer participation and producing brand-aligned content from the responses.
What the working contests have in common
Three structural rules show up across every contest that actually produced sustained value.
The mechanic produces content. Lay's produced flavors. Doritos produced spots. Coca-Cola produced photos. Contests that produce only a winner — pure sweepstakes — underperform contests that produce volume of brand-aligned content. The named output, repeated thousands of times, is the asset the contest is actually buying.
The barrier to entry is calibrated. Too low and the entries are spam. Too high and the entry count collapses. Lay's flavor submission required a real idea. Doritos required a finished video. Both produced sustained, brand-aligned entry volume because the barrier filtered out the noise without killing the participation.
The platform integration is native. Facebook contests that run inside a tab on the brand's Facebook Page consistently outperform off-platform contests requiring a redirect. The friction matters more than most brands assume. Consumers will not leave the platform to enter a contest if they have to leave the platform to enter a contest.
Working considerations for brands building contest mechanics
Pick the right contest type for the brand's goal. Fan-acquisition contests look different from data-collection contests, which look different from content-generation contests. The mechanic should match the goal, not be borrowed from another brand whose goals are different.
Plan the post-contest activation. What happens to the winning flavor, the winning spot, the winning user-generated photo? The contests that compound are the ones where the corporate team actually does something visible with the output. The contests that fizzle are the ones where the winner gets a check and the campaign disappears.
Build in the legal review early. Contest rules, sweepstakes regulations, state-by-state requirements, and platform-specific terms of service all matter. Brands that treat the legal review as a checkbox at the end produce contests that have to be paused or pulled.
Use the contest as a content asset for owned channels. The Facebook contest is the entry point. The brand's blog, email database, and other owned properties should be amplifying the contest, surfacing the entries, and feeding traffic back to the contest mechanic.
Measure on outcomes, not entry volume. A contest that produces 100,000 entries and converts none of them is not a successful contest. The discipline is to track the contest's actual contribution to the brand goal — sales lift, email signups, brand awareness, sentiment shift — rather than the surface metric the agency report will lead with.
Plan for the long tail. The best contests produce ongoing engagement long after the formal campaign ends. Winning Lay's flavors get talked about for years. Winning Doritos spots are referenced for the next several Super Bowls. The investment compounds if the brand keeps the story alive.
What the institutional precedents look like
Contest mechanics are not exclusive to consumer brands. National tourism boards — Visit Britain, Tourism Australia, Visit Iceland — have been running photo-submission contests as the upper-funnel discovery mechanic for destination marketing. The Royal Family has deployed photography-submission and children's-design contest mechanics across multiple jubilee and royal-event activations. The Vatican has been running its own social media contests in connection with World Youth Day and Pope Francis's broader digital outreach.
The institutional cases follow the same structural rules as the commercial ones — content-producing mechanics, calibrated barriers to entry, native platform integration. The pattern transfers.
The bottom line
Facebook contests work. The brands running them well — Lay's, Doritos, Coca-Cola, and a long list of others — are using them as a structured way to produce branded content, build engagement, and surface customer creativity at scale. The brands sitting out the format are leaving real opportunity on the table.
The discipline is to pick the right mechanic for the brand's goal, calibrate the barrier to entry, integrate natively into the platform, and plan the post-contest activation that turns the campaign into a sustained brand asset. Done well, a Facebook contest produces years of compounding value. Done badly, it produces a press release and a winner and not much else.
The format will keep evolving as Facebook itself evolves. The structural logic — branded content at scale, produced by participants, surfaced by the brand — will outlast whichever platform is running it.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
