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Through the sheer ingenuity of their Internet-based promotionaland sweepstakes management service, RealTime Media Inc. co-founderChuck Seidman and his partners, Bruce S. Allen, Bob Auxier, PeterJensen and Charles Ruderman, have persuaded some of America'smost admired companies to hire them.

The Haverford, Pennsylvania, firm has a lock on the technologyfor creating scratch-and-win promotions on the Internet (patentpending). Rather than scraping faux gold leaf off of a paperticket, Internet surfers scratch away with their mice to revealwhether they've won prizes.

As it turns out, the lure of winning $1 million instantly--or,as with the current Beat the Street promotion, $20 million forcorrectly guessing the close of the Dow Jones and NYSE average on aparticular day--is an extremely effective technique for directingInternet surfers to a particular site. "It's all aboutdriving traffic," says Seidman, 47. "Being on theInternet means nothing unless you can get traffic to your site andconvert [surfers] into members or give them incentive to take adesired action." Apparently the heavyweights agree, becausethe likes of Microsoft, Lycos, Ford, Yahoo!, the NFL and CDnow havehired RealTime to create custom instant-win promotions to drivetraffic to their Web sites.