Crown Royal and Pass the Crown - A Game You Can Win!

Congratulations to Kristy from Ashville, Ohio who was drawn as our lucky winner and will receive a Kindle Fire from Proof66 (courtesy of Crown Royal). Thanks to everyone who participated and we hope to be able to have another contest sometime soon.

Gift Updates:

November 14: iPad2

November 15: Beats by Dre Headphones

November 16: Omaha Steaks All-American Combo

November 17: Oakley Blender Sunglasses

November 18: Crown Royal XR & Happy Hour

November 21: Crown Royal Reserve & Happy Hour

November 22: Bulova Adventurer Watches

November 28: Flask Gift Set

November 29: Kindle Fire

November 30: Cyber-shot Digital Cameras

December 1: All-Expense Paid Trip to NASCAR event

December 2: Kindle Fire

December 5: Tiffany Cuffllinks

December 6: Autographed Rodney Atkins Guitars 

We have a lot of love for craft-distilled liquor. It’s romantic to think of one or two people, distilling away on some hillside, far away from the law, plucking the grain blade by blade and blending the distillate down with dew gathered drop by drop off of clover in unspoiled meadows.

But it’s also fun to have decades of distilling experience and a bazillion barrels of whisky to show for it. And the marketing can be lots of fun, too.

To prove it, Crown Royal—one of the biggest names in Canadian Whisky (and whisky in general)—has launched a holiday social media game. November 14 was the inaugural day and for each of the next 20 days, Crown is going to hand out gifts to different review sites (and we get to be one of them!) In fact, they’ll get two gifts: one for the review site to keep and one for one of its  lucky fans.

At the end of the day, the site gets to choose: keep the gifts or pass? The vox pouli will no doubt speak.

But that’s not the end. The next day, the next site has a chance to steal. Their vox populi will speak. This game should be familiar to folks who have engaged in white elephant gift giving over the holiday season. It will also be familiar to card players playing games from Hearts to Screw Your Neighbor. Crown Royal leaves no shadow of doubt:

"Trash talking is encouraged!  Mad that another influencer stole your gift?  Tell them about it via the #PassTheCrown hashtag on Twitter or mention them in a Facebook post!"

The gifts actually look to be pretty cool. up to and including sponsored happy hours, which ought to be very popular over this party season. You can follow the main event at their Facebook page.

Is this a good idea? Hell yes it's a good idea. And we're going to play. And we hope we win something on the order of 1,700 liters of quality Canadian Whisky. If being BIG is good for anything it's for helping the consumer marketplace with stuff like this: help them explore! Give them a reason to go out and try new things. It's very likely that a whole generation of 21+ populi have heard of Crown Royal but don't know much about it at all. This gives them a reason to try. Having tried, some of them will suddenly realize that they like whiskey. This can only be a good thing for the industry all the way down to the small-time craft-distillers who can barely afford to sponsor a single drink of their own stuff at the local bar.

For all the very worthy causes out there-and there are plenty-there's a time to shed guilt and have fun. If booze is good for anything-anything at all-it's for exactly this: having fun, engaging in some online trash talk, and generally having a party. So why shouldn't Crown Royal celebrate something that their product is precisely designed to enhance? It's as natural as bean agriculturists sponsoring air fresheners.