I spent one summer project managing a $1.8m campaign on the British Airways account. The program offered free flights to build awareness of BA’s international flight routes, with an underlying strategy to build a database of opt-in promotionally responsive customers from scratch. Within days of the drawing of winners taking place, we had mailed every entrant a personalized thank you for entering that included a voucher good for money off any British Airways Holiday package at participating retailers. All of the Holiday packages were internationally themed, and we communicated a new Holiday package each week in store and in the press over the six-week period following the end of the free flights promotion. It was an incredibly successful, award-winning campaign; over 1,500,000 entries were received, holiday sales went up, and awareness went through the roof.

You don’t get 1.5 million entries into a sweepstakes (actually a prize draw, to use the UK terminology) without creating buzz and providing an easy means of entry. So we planned at least a dozen different distribution channels for communicating the offer, including printed entry forms in newspapers, entry leaflet inserts in newspapers, leaflets distributed in airports, at travel agents, as inserts in frequent flyer program mailings, in travel-related locations such as train and Underground stations, and at major retailers where cross-promotional displays had been pre-agreed.

It was my responsibility to manage how many leaflets were to be produced for each distribution channel. We were stretching the budget to the limit, and there just didn’t seem to be enough funds to produce as many entry leaflets as we had calculated on the whiteboard. The final print volume of leaflets was about 50% of what we really wanted to produce. So we had to settle that a travel agent might only get 500 leaflets rather than the 1,000 leaflets we had originally planned, and we set up a stock replenishment program that allowed that 20% of the travel agents would be calling in asking for more entry leaflets. It seemed like we had all our bases covered.

Within days of the ink drying, millions of entry leaflets were off to their destinations, and my world was abuzz with all the different kickoff events we had going on. And that’s when the requests started coming in for additional leaflets. Not just from travel agents, but from everywhere. It seemed as if everyone wanted to enter to win free flights from every quarter of the country, and the SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) method of entry, while legally adequate, just didn’t have the same impact as placing an actual entry leaflet into the hands of a potential British Airways customer.

Just to be safe, besides the stock replenishment supply program, I had allowed for a contingency of about 100,000 entry leaflets to be drawn upon as requests came in. I doled these out as if I was rationing food supplies, never as many as someone asked for, but certainly enough to satisfy the consumer demand our channel partners were reporting. As if it had been choreographed, my 100,000-leaflet supply dwindled down to a recyclable remainder just as the campaign reached full blossom. We had managed through all the urgent requests, and the phone calls had stopped coming in.

And that’s when the managing director of our agency came in to see me. It was mid-morning, and he walked in very slowly. He asked me how I was. I said fine. He said, “I know that the answer is no, but I just need to ask: do you have any more of those entry leaflets – any at all?” I asked why. Apparently the chairman of British Airways was speaking with the chairman of Harrods, the Knightsbridge department store (and one of our retail cross-promotional partners). It seems that the promotion was going very well, and the request had come down from the top that Harrods was rapidly running out of entry leaflets. So the secretary of British Airways’ chairman’s office had called our managing director asking if more leaflets could be sent over, straightaway.

I didn’t say anything. I locked my eyes with his briefly, then reached down under my desk and pulled out an unmarked box of 5,000 leaflets. This was my last line of defense, and only I knew about its existence. In the sleepless nights leading up to the campaign launch date, I knew that, if it came down to it, there wouldn’t even be time to call for leaflets to be shipped from the distribution center. Time would be of the essence, and these leaflets would need to be hand delivered – probably by me – to wherever they needed to be. I handed my MD the last box – the last drop – of entry leaflets. They represented less than 0.1% of the total print run, and I had held them back for just this moment. You should have seen his eyes light up. And so did mine.