Since only one caller per show receives the coveted candidate status - and to keep the costs for Hugo fans within limits - he or she is called back by the Hugo team and can fight for the main prize. In the process, they have to help the cartoon character Hugo overcome treacherous obstacles at the touch of a button and save his family in the end - all live on the phone during the broadcast.
In order to inspire more than just individual callers who were allowed to participate live, all callers were given the opportunity to leave their names and contact details in a structured way on a CreaLog portal. They were then automatically entered into a draw for attractive consolation prizes. The large amount of address data obtained could then also be used for the TV station's marketing activities.
Behind the scenes, a staff of 30 coordinates technology, cameras, callers, games and prizes. Among the presenters on the team are Sonja Zietlow and Minh-Khai Phan-Thi who both make the leap into big show business from Hugo. Hugo himself ran, surfed, swam in 674 episodes of the Hugo show until 1997 - and is still present on the web, as the pages of the fan club prove: www.hugoswelt.de.
Refer to Wikipedia for more information:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Hugo_Show
The Hugo system is one of the early forerunners of today's mass voting platforms, which are used again and again for voting in current entertainment shows such as the ESC. Back then, 250,000 calls had to be handled in 30 minutes, but today the CreaLog Mass Voting platform at Swisscom manages many times that amount. During televote and call-in campaigns for Swiss TV and radio stations, several hundred thousand calls and SMS are processed in the short time windows of the broadcasts. To make it even clearer: The platform handles around 1,400 new calls per second during live televoting operations!