Yes, I Voted in the 2012 Freddie Awards
A fellow blogger conveniently posted the link to the voting portal and I decided to have a quick look. The voting was quick and easy, but my very good impression of the overall process was spoiled at the end.
Initially I was thinking I would be very fast out as I was not going to fill out a long registration form with name, address (usually I just make up these things but I am getting tired of these forms), e-mail, password (the same ones used for not so important sites), go to the account and activate the link, etc. I was not willing to put too much time into voting for nothing in exchange.
However, there was no registration required and not even an e-mail address was asked (‘Well done, Freddie!’ I thought). But the last page spoiled it.
Click on a sponsor to uncover exclusive offers for Freddie voters.
The offers are not exclusive at all, the iPad from milepoint is for everyone registered and American Express didn’t seem to have any special offers. I clicked on the logo and you just navigate to the site with the URL https://www.americanexpress.com/ , usually in these cases there is a longer URL to keep track where the user came from. I thought that perhaps they might use a different technique so I launched americanexpress.com in a different Internet session, I chose the country ‘United States’ and sure enough the site was the same as coming from http://vote.freddieawards.com/thanks.html.
I did not check for the other sponsors but I suppose the situation is the same.
Why did they have to resort to such a ‘technique’? They must have been told (by the sponsors perhaps) that people would not notice and they would think the offers are exclusive !
