Tell a compelling brand story with daily “reveal” campaign mechanics that encourage repeat visitation and drive data acquisition. Give consumers the chance to enter sweepstakes, unlock content, watch videos and much more.

These campaigns allow you to present a collection of promotions to users that unlock over time. Each promotion in the collection supports a locked and unlocked view and can even expose its own detail page, created using our drag-and-drop Page Designer. Keep people engaged by mixing up what you reveal each time... an exclusive video, an article, a competition, a special offer or coupon... it's completely up to you. Even better, all of this is managed as a single campaign... revealed content appearing instantly in an overlay or inline as a new navigation item.

There's no restriction on the number of promotions that you reveal... so you can use the campaigns to drive a week of sales, reveal sneak peeks of a new product in the days counting down to its launch or, of course, as an advent calendar. You can layout the promotions in a number of ways... from a simple grid to a Christmas tree! While the two campaigns share similar capabilities, the Advent Calendar campaign comes preconfigured with 24 promotions for each day of Advent.

Here's an example Advent Calendar:

In the example above, there are 24 promotions displayed using the 'tree' layout. A background image has been applied to reinforce the tree design. Each promotion has a locked image and an unlocked image. In the screenshot above, only day one has been unlocked. Day one has been configured to open an overlay with a detail page that includes a special offer. 

Users are able to configure an entry form for both Countdown Reveal and Advent Calendar campaigns which can then be displayed on detail pages whenever you choose. In the example above, this is used on day thirteen to promote a competition and collect entries direct from the overlay. You could collect data from users whenever you want... every day, every other day or only on certain days. Whenever a user completes the entry form, we record which promotion the user was viewing. If you're using the entry form to collect competition entries across several days, you can then use Winner Management to select an overall winner and/or a winner sourced from each day or promotion.

A quick walk-through...

Let's take a closer look at the key steps in creating and managing a reveal campaign:

1. Creating your campaign: Navigate to the Experience Library and under Giveaways choose either the Countdown Reveal or Advent Calendar.

2. Viewing promotions: Once you've completed the wizard, your campaign will be created and preloaded with some example promotions (24 in the case of an Advent Calendar). Click on the 'Reveal Promotions' link in the left menu to view them:

3. Setting up promotions: Each reveal promotion can be configured by clicking on the 'cog' icon:

^ In the 'Settings' tab, you can set the promotion's name, display order and availability dates, as well as some more advanced features such as controlling the size of the promotion when using a 'Masonry' layout (more on this later) and setting a custom source name (see note at end of this article for more details).

^ In the 'Content' tab, you can choose whether the promotion simply shows its unlocked state or also displays a detail page, built using the Page Designer. Detail pages can either be shown as a simple or detailed promotion (the promotion will click-through to a detail page). You can also setup the locked and unlocked states. 

4. Creating a detail page: When a promotion is configured to present aa a detailed promotion, a new action will appear in the reveal promotion list. In the screen below, we've set our first promotion to show you the ability to edit a promotion layout:

Clicking on the Page Designer icon will open the Page Designer where you can easily create a rich detail page with galleries, videos, callouts, offers, entry forms and more. It's this flexibility that lets you mix things up each day and keep things interesting throughout the lifespan of the campaign. 

Common actions for each promotion are:

•  Edit promotion
•  Edit detail page
•  Publish or unpublish your promotion
•  Clone your promotion

That last action is very useful if you'd like some of your promotions to follow a similar pattern... perhaps cycling between two or three different promotion styles throughout the campaign.

Important: When you first create a reveal campaign, promotions will be set as 'unpublished'. This means that you can configure them but that they won't be displayed to end users or available in preview. To test them out during campaign build or to see them in the live campaign, they must be published using the publish action outlined above. Furthermore, you might want to use temporary availability dates to test your promotions in both the locked and unlocked states. Remember to set the final availability dates before you launch your campaign, however!

5. Displaying your promotions: Reveal campaigns come with an Promotions Calendar (or Advent Calendar), which is used to display your promotions, and a Confirmation Page, which is shown whenever a user completes an entry form and submits it:

If you click into the Promotions Calendar (or Advent) page, you'll see that a 'Promotion' module has been placed on it. It's this module that displays your promotions and controls the ordering and layout of your promotions:

Depending on whether you're configuring a Countdown Reveal or Advent Calendar campaign, you'll find some or all of the following layouts available:

• List: A vertical list of promotions... useful if you want to display the reveal campaign as a list of callout-sized promotions.
• Small Grid: A compact grid of promotions... useful for presenting promotions as a traditional calendar.
• Large Grid: Items in the grid are larger and less are shown per row.
• Carousel: One promotion is shown at a time, and users can cycle through the promotions.
• Tree: Promotions are arranged in a triangular structure, as in the example earlier.
• Masonry: A grid-like layout that supports four different-sized promotions (compact, standard, featured, and hero). This layout will attempt to build solid wall of promotions from all of the different sized promotions you provide to it. Note that the order may be tweaked to build 'a wall with no holes.'

We recommend publishing at least 10 promotions to get the most out of the 'Tree' and 'Masonry' layouts. 

6. Previewing and publishing your campaign: Remember, promotions have their own publishing settings. You'll need to publish your promotions to see them in the preview version of your campaign. If you set temporary availability dates for your promotions so that you could test them in their locked and unlocked modes, please review the 'Reveal Promotions' list to make sure that all dates are ready for prime-time. When everything's ready, simply publish your campaign to make it available to end users. 

Implementation Notes: For your first experiment, stick to locked and unlocked images that are of the same size and not too large. Once you've got that up and running, perhaps try using a background image to really make your promotion layout shine, as in the example earlier. Remember that you can use the theme designer or custom CSS to tweak the spacing of your promotions. If you need assistance, our Services team offer a package to help you build out an advent calendar or reveal campaign. Speak to your customer success manager to find out more.

Advanced Notes: Custom source names

If you include an entry form in a reveal promotion detail page, we'll attribute any entries submitted to that promotion. We do this by taking the promotion's name, removing whitespace and turning to lowercase and using this as the 'source' of the entry. So, if your promotion is called "Day 1" we'll record any entries from that promotion as source=day1. You can then use this in the Winner Management feature to select winners where source=day1.

Sometimes, you might want to attribute entries from multiple promotions to a single source... for example a sponsor or multi-day competition. This is where a custom source name comes in. In the reveal promotion editor, you'll find a field called 'source' where you can specify a custom source name, e.g. "Multi Day Competition." Entries from any promotions that have the same custom source name will be submitted will as source=multidaycompetition. Now, in Winner Management, you can select one or more winners across those promotions with the same source name.