Yahoo! Malaysia, I found a ticket for Youreka!

In an effort to remain a popular choice to Malaysians, Yahoo! Malaysia is now running an online contest in their new marketing campaign; Youreka! This campaign is to promote and increase their awareness, readership, members to their news portal, mail service and other services offered.

The idea is a treasure hunt to locate one of 3 tickets in either Yahoo! Malaysia, the news portal, the mail service or the the messenger. Yahoo! has tied up with local vendors like Adidas and fashionistas like Tongue in Chic, to name a few, to help them promote this campaign.

In total, there are 4 colored tickets; red, blue, green and purple. The purple ones are the wild card for you to stand a chance to win one of the many prizes they’ll be giving out at the Youreka! finale party. These prizes are from the Blackbery Curve, Adidas shoes and accessories to even movie screening tickets.

I’ve already redeemed my gift for the red ticket, I got a water bottle. And it’s at these redemption spots, you’re asked to dip into their box to see if you’re lucky enough to pull out a purple tag. If not, you can redeem 1 of 2 gifts.

This is quite an interesting campaign to run and I’ve definitely thought about it before. A mini treasure hunt or scavenger hunt within a website automatically boosts traffic and makes it fun browsing it.

However, I hope spotting the remaining tickets later wouldn’t be as difficult. I’ve tried finding the tickets in Yahoo! messenger and Yahoo! mail but it was nearly impossible.

So far, I’ve found had better luck finding the red and blue tickets in the news portal. That’s an insiders tip for you, if you’re participating in Youreka!

You want the job? Wake up lah!

My interest in the whole wakuplah! marketing campaign came when Ikhwan (tekong) showed me a series of banners. One of them was this one:

The poster read:

If you think that as long as you know Photoshop and Illustrator, you can be an art director already…wake up! 13-year olds also know Photoshop-lah.

I giggled at the statement made because it was true. This poster was part of a series of others which also poked fun at copywriters, freelancers and attendees at AD Unplugged 2009.

From the very nature of the series, I already had a feeling the upcoming website was aimed at job seekers. True enough, when the website launched some time last night, the people behind it sent curious cats like me  an animated GIF with the access password. Yes, it was in an animated GIF.

Because sharing is caring and it should be shared, out of the 4 passwords they gave the correct one is, Kopi_O. That’s a capital letter ‘O’ and not numerical.

As much as the Matrix was cool, I’m not fond of a couple of things in this website.

• Wait to login due to Flash loading.
• Reversed text on button.
• Distractingly huge password text behind.
• Annoying spinning text characters after entering.
• Forced to catch the rabbit otherwise you can’t proceed.
• Forced to type in text to the self-proclaimed ‘Oracle’ before you’ve the option to proceed.
• Text heavy pages with typeface which isn’t comforting to read.

Honestly, the troubles listed above took away my expectation of experiencing something good from this campaign – online, at least.

As much as awareness goes, I won’t be saying on Twitter “Hey, you should visit this website. It’s damn cool.”

If the owner does read this review, it’s not been written purposely to cause damage. I’m only sharing my personal experience of using your campaign website.

Besides, I still applaud you for the lead up banners done. That was cool.