In response to our concern that many individuals at agencies (where computers are networked) could not vote once one person had, competition queen bee Dabitch got back to us with this explanation:
Hiya Michael.
I know the problem, it's not just unfair to the CB blog, it's unfair to
all the blogs as everyone in this competition has fans at ad agencies and
oter types of offices, so you are all in the same situation. Could we call
it fairly unfair? ;) Unfair in a fair way? My fair lady?
The reason one IP# (as announced from the start on the battle page) only
got one vote is pretty simple - while it's not a perfect system in
determining if it is one individual who votes, it keeps people from voting
over and over and over again from one IP. If a single IP# would be allowed
to vote an unlimited amount of times, you betcha there would be scripts
running 24/7 jacking up the votes to astronomical numbers in a matter of
minutes. (such scripts are easy to find all over the web, and have often
been used in other types of "vote for X blog" style competitions.).
One is left with two choices really, either allow one vote per IP#, a
crude and simple machine definition of "individual" or, ask all voters to
register with their emails. Neither one of these options are foolproof,
and the latter email option usually discourages more than half the people
to vote. Surfers just want a button to click and that's it. If it becomes
an "reply to this email to register your vote"-hassle, most people won't
bother to do it. And people like me, who own multiple domains, could
easily sign up with an untold amount of emails and reply to all of them,
thus jacking the vote again. I will reconsider this option again next year
however.
In the end I choose the IP# bar, because even though it does stop people
at ad agencies where they surf through a proxy that doesn't differentiate
between the individual computers it serves, most people can work around
this. If they have laptops, they can vote from a nearby wifi enabled café,
if they home computers they can vote from there. Hell, you could vote with
most mobile phones and hand held computers these days, the workstation at
peoples offices isn't the only machine people have to access the net with.
And more importantly, not all offices have proxies that leave one single
IP# as a footprint for 600 people. Another way of doing it which used to
be quite common was to make the computers state who they are within that
network, like computer12.fallon.com & computer13.fallon.com etc rather
than pat-e-cake.fallon.com [the name of fallons proxy] - but uni-style
networking like that has fallen out f fashion at large companies as of
late. Probably because pat-e-cake.fallon.com most likely is the firewall
and virus protector for everybody's machine at fallon in these dangerous
times. ;)
I have no doubt that many agencies down under wanted to vote for you, it
was pretty clear in the logs, you might have spotted some famous names in
there yourself after reading it.
So while this isn't perfect, IP-free solutions are too easy to game, and
in the end this IP-barrier was equally unfair to everyone. You can post
this reply on your blog if you wish to share with your readers, they
probably want to know what the deal is about the IP# too. Hope this clears
up my reasoning at least!
By the way, I still have an issue of CampaignBrief that i managed to snag
somewhere in Cannes backin 97... Odd, the timestamp here says 97 but I
thought it was Cannes98 from memory. I must be getting old, or perhaps I
just drank too damn much every year that I was there so they all blend
together....... (I stopped going in 2000)
At the bottom here I might even be quoting you? "As it says in
CampaignBrief, "the writer of the Nike ad is Jose Molla (Michael Simons'
ex partner) who is also the talent.""
http://ad-rag.com/509.php
Cheerio
Åsk Dabitch
