I know I've rambled below, so Cliff Notes: there were way too many marketing benefits for the Ferguson Challenge to have just been a BRM demonstration. Stars never got the marketing right for Negreanu's challenge and, therefore, I suspect that nobody was getting anything out of it and that's why it died in the water.
I'm not sure any of you grasped Ferguson's intent. His challenge was an exercise in Bankroll Management. It wasn't as much about how much money you can make, but rather how to manage your bankroll and play games that are within your bankroll.
In
poker terms sure, it was a demonstration of the importance of proper bankroll management.
If you honestly think that was its only goal though then I think you're missing the bigger picture. Ferguson makes an awful lot of money from his involvement with Full Tilt. The more money they make the more they can give to him and attracting both players and attention to the site is obviously key to this money-growing process. If you can't see the big, very well orchestrated marketing component of the Ferguson Challenge then you're missing something.
For obvious reasons he was never going to explicitly say that in any of the material he published about his challenge and I choose to believe that he's an honourable guy so I'm sure he meant this to be a lesson / demonstration in good BRM as well. But every time he talked about it, he said he was doing it on
full tilt poker. When someone linked to an update on the challenge, they linked to Full Tilt Poker because that's where the info was published. When someone wanted to go watch him in action, they had to log in to Full Tilt Poker. And if they wanted to have a crack at the challenge themselves Full Tilt would've been the place a lot of people chose to try it.
As for NCFoldem's point about the differences between a pro and an amateur doing this, I think that's another unstated benefit of the challenge for Full Tilt. Very few of the amateur players who attempt this challenge will ever reach the goal. What a lot of them
will have done, however, is gotten frustrated and then deposit on the site.
It also showed off what a good player Ferguson is because let's face it, this was a pretty difficult task even for a professional. And when Ferguson (or any of the site's other big-name sponsored pros) looks good, the site looks good.