On Monday, 5 March 2007, The Vottle Project, South Africa's first and only free online classifieds service, launched a competition on 5FM radio whereby the general public can win eBucks, South Africa's leading rewards currency, and a range of exciting high-tech prizes. Vottle, which was inspired by the Craigslist.com phenomena in the United States, has broken new ground in the South African micropayments arena with eBucks as the enabling currency.

In the past 6 months, eBucks has worked with Vottle to develop a revolutionary payment facility. This innovative application allows people to trade on the free Vottle classifieds platform using their free eBucks rewards currency. This is the first micropayment facility of its kind in South Africa.

The 5FM campaign takes the form of a treasure hunt whereby a mystery classified advert will be posted on the Vottle site each day and radio listeners will be given clues as to the nature of the classifieds advert on Sasha Martinengo and Ian F's daily show. Daily prizes of eB25 000 (worth R2 500) are up for grabs.

Since the launch of the competition, the traffic on www.vottle.com has climbed to around 20 000 hits per day.

The idea behind the campaign is to drive Vottle registrations and to promote this free online service. The aim of the project is to establish a leading online trading brand here in South Africa and to grow a user base. The idea is to establish an online classifieds platform that is easy to use and without any cost to the user. And if people buy with their eBucks they are effectively getting stuff for free.

At the end of the 10 day campaign, on 16 March, all ten winners will go into a live draw where one lucky person will win a Dell Inspiron laptop, a Nokia E65 and an HSDPA card from Layer One.

The Vottle team will be able to monitor the success of the campaign on the fly by a sophisticated statistics monitoring system that has been put in place.

There is a another component to the campaign that takes the form of a "garage sale" whereby the person who makes the most postings in a week will also win a high-tech prize consisting of a Skype Phone, a Nokia E50 cellphone and an iPod Nano with a Gelaskin cover.

There is nothing to lose here since everything is free and there is also a chance that someone may want to purchase something you post on this free classifieds service. And that is the whole point.

About eBucks:

eBucks, the rewards programme offered by First National Bank (FNB) and RMB Private Bank, is acknowledged as one of South Africa's leading rewards programmes with highly active members spending in excess of 80% of the eBucks earned in any given month.