It’s been more than 40 years since the first moon landing. It came at a time of rapid progress in space flight. Dog, chimps, future senators, you name it, they were in orbit. And what, pray tell, was the catalyst behind it all? The space race. An unofficial contest to see who could be the first to put a man in space…then a man on the moon…and then, it stopped. For the most part at least. The latest defibralator to the chest of space flight? A little thing called the Ansari X Prize. A contest with a $10,000,000 reward to the first group that could launch a vehicle into space and then repeat the process with the same vehicle within two weeks.

The bottom line is, contests drive innovation. If you want a stellar logo designed, a fancy creative firm may work out great for $10k, but for $500 you could let a contest at 99designs shake out equally stellar work. Take sports. If there were no X Games, would guys be landing triple cork 1440s? Ain’t no way, ain’t no how.

Again, constests drive innovation. The are an especially efficient way to create truck loads of amazing content or products or results.

Vail Resorts? Yep, They’re Using Them
If you are suddenly wishing you had an extra $10,000 in your wallet, you’re too late. That was the prize for the winner of the EpicMix ad contest. The deadline for submissions was just over a week ago. I sure hope they make the submissions public so we can see the creativity inspired by visions of being handed a giant check.

Canyons is Using Them Too
“How Do You Mountain” brought in a huge number of entries and buzz. The ROI is up for discussion, but the fact remains that the possibility of landing a gig that put you up in a ritzy hotel, getting paid to blog, and skiing every day was enough motivation to get hundreds of hopefuls to submit an entry. My brother-in-law included.

Same With Boreal
The Team Video Challenge is the recipe behind 13 amazing ski films shot on location at Boreal every single year. The prizes aren’t amazingly huge, but the glory and recognition help the resort score some amazing footage all in the name of competition.

If you are in the market for genius (and possibly expensive) content, it might be worth your time to at see what a contest can do.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.