Sweepstakes: SmartMoney, "The Fantasy Portfolio Manager Challenge"
Iris Dorbian

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A fantasy come true: what do you get when you combine two passions of affluent Baby Boomers—investing and baseball—and use it to leverage a vehicle from a popular auto brand? You get “The Fantasy Portfolio Manager Challenge,” an interactive, integrated program developed by SmartMoney and SmartMoney.com, which allowed participants to manage a team of stocks, as if they were managing a sports team, from a pool of 60 “free agent” equities. Because the game was played from April 15 to May 31, 2007, when baseball season was in full batting swing, a motif highlighting America’s favorite pastime ran throughout the design, as well as in all print and online marketing and promotional materials. For all those involved, especially Honda, which was the exclusive sponsor of the stock picking game, it was a slam-dunk hit.

“There were a lot of touchpoints throughout the execution of this—a lot of back and forth,” says Bill Shaw, publisher and general manager of SmartMoney and SmartMoney.com. “We created this whole baseball theme that they wanted to be around with the fantasy game. So literally it was surrounding their message into our game. And we just integrated them in. It was pretty seamless.”

Seeking to promote their Honda Pilot, an SUV, Honda was heavily involved in all aspects of the marketing of the challenge. Not only was the company featured prominently in the header of all Fantasy Portfolio Manager pages and on ads that ran on SmartMoney.com, but it also created special baseball-themed ads to run on the game page, touting the SUV. Ads also ran in two issues of SmartMoney magazine that displayed Honda’s sponsorship.

The month-long challenge attracted over 1,700 visitors to sign up and play the game. The grand prize was $5,000 in cash; second place received a Gevril timepiece; and the third place winner received a one-year subscription to SmartMoney Select. The combined interest and results made this SmartMoney.com’s most successful investing game ever.
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