Election Section

LOS ANGELES – Managing chads, hanging and otherwise, is a regular part of business for BigBallot Inc., the company that runs the All-Star balloting for Major League Baseball and other sports leagues. 

In BigBallot’s elections, in which as many as 400,000 votes are counted a day, battered ballots are discarded and workers struggle to keep tabulating machines from getting clogged with tenaciously clinging bits of paper. 

“We deal with a lot of the same things they’re dealing with in Florida,” said Jeff Gehl, chief executive officer at BigBallot. “We have the same issue with chads. It fills up our machines. You end up with ballots that are unreadable.” 

While counting and recounting is causing turmoil in Florida, it is fueling the success BigBallot has enjoyed over the past 25 years. At a time when Internet companies are struggling, BigBallot is making a successful transition from bricks to clicks. 

The company, based in Manhattan Beach, Calif., began its life tabulating paper ballots for the National Basketball Association All-Star game in 1975. It was known as The Marketing Center in those days, and soon it was managing the all-star balloting programs for most major league sports. Its current roster of customers also includes ESPN’s Espy Awards and the TV Guide Awards. 

Two years ago, a group led by Gehl bought TMC and offered its services to Web-based companies to get in early on a growing trend — moving offline clients to the Internet and offering Internet firms a much-needed offline presence. 

For Internet clients, the company offers a way to keep visitors on their sites longer — known in Web lingo as making the sites “sticky.” 

“As they rushed to get to the Internet, they created these great sites, but didn’t have strategies in place for repeat visits,” said Eric Bechtel, executive vice president of sales. 

To add stickiness, BigBallot develops polls, sweepstakes and other interactive offerings that require visitors to fill out registration forms, play games and come back daily for chances to win prizes. The company also incorporates offline elements that encourage someone to log onto a client’s Web site to play a game or cast a vote. 

A notably sticky Web site is iWon.com. The sweepstakes portal and search engine, whose majority owner is CBS television, offers its users a chance to win $10,000 a day, $1 million a month and an annual grand prize of $10 million. Visitors qualify for the prizes simply by using iWon’s site to search the Web. 

The entire program — even the phone call made to the winners — is run by BigBallot. 

“The stickiest sites on the Web tend to be the sites with money components attached to them,” said Sean Kaldor, vice president of ecommerce at NetRatings. “People are flocking to sites that give them a financial incentive to go there.” 

For Citysearch, an online entertainment guide, BigBallot ran a promotion to choose top attractions in various cities that was designed to drive traffic to the sponsor’s site. 

“We’re very much behind the scenes,” said Gehl. “We do a lot of the grunt work and back room stuff companies don’t want to do.” 

BigBallot’s experience in tabulating ballots and entries yields a sideline business — detailed databases that clients can use to more efficiently target advertising and promotions. That service is critical on the Web, where advertisers are looking for a bigger bang than that derived from generic banner ads. 

“Many advertisers are focused on their return on investment and the actual conversion they’re getting,” said Christopher Todd, an analyst at Jupiter Research. 

The transition online for BigBallot has been better than expected. The privately owned company said its revenue grew 100 percent last year, and it is predicting similar growth during the next three years.  

The company does not release sales figures. 

The company also has plans to extend its services to the wireless world.  

This year, BigBallot ran a test with the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team, allowing fans to use cell phones to choose a most valuable player each inning and answer a trivia question flashed on the scoreboard. Correct answers went into a drawing for a prize.