Competitions Advice Library
Compers News editor Steve Middleton has written many articles on competitions, and how to win prizes. His monthly ‘Smorgasbord of Smid’ articles ran for almost three years in Compers News, and he has also written in the past for other magazines including Competitors Journal, Competitor’s Companion, Prize Draw Winner and First Prize.
Here’s a selection of his very best articles, which will hopefully give you plenty of hints, tips and ideas. Where appropriate, information and advice has been updated to make it as relevant as possible to today’s comper.
Smid On… Instant Wins
The instant win is a relative newcomer on the comping scene. As a youngster, one of my favourite books was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and how I wished that companies really would hide golden tickets in their products! Alas, as this particular kind of promotion has multiplied and become increasingly contrived over recent years, the reality of the instant win (or ‘instant lose’ as some compers prefer to call them!) rarely provides a happy ending. Many ‘real’ compers avoid them, some genuinely despise them, and it’s not difficult to see why. The odds of winning anything worthwhile are usually outlandish. The number of prizes that “can” be won usually bears no resemblance whatsoever to the number that actually are claimed. And the physical act of actually finding a winning message printed on the inside of a packet, bottom of a can, or buried amongst various foodstuffs (or worse!) is messy at best – and sometimes downright degrading!
Having said all of that, I actually like instant wins! I’ve won thousands of ‘instant’ prizes, most of them of limited use admittedly, but for me the thrill of the chase and trying to ‘crack the code’ of a particular promotion gives me as much pleasure as trying to fashion an unbeatable tiebreaker. When I contributed to a discussion on the subject on Chatterbox, explaining some of my theories, it led to the whole ‘science’ of trying to beat instant win promoters at their own game being christened “doing a Smid” (Smid being my Chatterbox user name). None of what I do is rocket science, it’s more to inject a bit of fun into my supermarket visits than anything else, but sometimes I do actually “strike gold” and stumble across a sure-fire method of spotting a winning pack. Even if the outcome is not so certain, there are things you can do to swing the odds in your favour (albeit ever so slightly) whenever you buy an instant win pack.
The Chatterbox discussion started with a question about a Kenco promotion, where you were warned that winning jars didn’t contain real coffee. And this leads nicely on to the major key to unlocking “Winstant Success”. Instant wins where a promoter has to make or print a totally different ‘winning’ batch and then somehow slip them in with the ‘normal’ (i.e. losing!) products are always worth a close check at the supermarket. The clue often lies in the label or packaging. A slightly different cut or colour shade if it was printed at a different time maybe, or a different batch code. I’ve had many wins in the past just by choosing an item with a different batch code or best before date to the rest. This isn’t foolproof of course, because different batches can obviously get mixed up on supermarket shelves. But some past examples have included Ribena (every winning carton had the same flaw in the printing of the ‘best before’ date and stood out a mile to the trained eye!), Riva biscuits (winning batch codes started with ‘3’, losers with ‘1’ or ‘2’), Viscount biscuits (winning packs all had the same batch code), Tuc biscuits (winning packs had batch codes stamped on them in a completely different font), and my favourite – Wet Wipes – whose winning wrappers had a ‘W’ after the batch code, and the losers ‘L’! More recently, the winning numbers in a Gulp milkshake promotion were printed on neck collars in a totally different font. Throw in the promotional labels that can easily be seen through, and crisp bags with increasingly bulky winning inserts that can easily be felt through the bag (by those of us inclined to do that sort of thing, of course!), and close examination of goods on supermarket shelves will always improve your instant win chances.
In fact, I sometimes think that promoters deliberately build in these flaws to keep us compers smiling. Those of us ‘in on the trick’ will be happy, thinking that we’re at an advantage. But the number of prizes issued is no different of course, so it won’t cost the promoters any more. In fact, the more winning packs we find, the more we’ll buy so in a perverse way it might actually benefit the promoters! Look at the last couple of Felix and Winalot instant wins, for example. Promotional cans “just happened” to have a clear white strip running around the top of the label. The winning message on the back of the label “just happened” to be printed directly underneath this white strip. Possibly accidental first time around, but same design on the second promotion? Make up your own mind! Conspiracy theory maybe, but I’ve seen so many ‘giveaway’ batch codes, transparent wrappers, see-through scratchcards etc. over the years I can’t help but wonder. Then again, perhaps promoters really are just slapdash and careless!
The big tell-tale clues as to whether batch codes, best before dates etc. might give the game away may lie in the revised pack design when a promotion appears. If an exact best before date suddenly just becomes a month and year, or a batch code that previously appeared on the top of a pack is suddenly relegated to a hidden area at the bottom, ask yourself why. I’ve seen winning packs that have had no codings on at all simply because they haven’t been through the normal production line, so just look for ANY possible clue. It’s often a good investment to buy a promotional pack at the start of a new competition anyway, probably a loser but never mind, just to get your bearings as to where messages etc. appear on the backs of labels and the like. This way you can sometimes ‘get your eye in’, even if it’s just knowing where you can see the ‘Y’ of ‘SORRY’ through the label or something like that. Then, when you come across a label that doesn’t have that ‘Y’ in the same place, it’s worth buying! Experimentation is the key.
And here are some other ideas. Invest in a powerful halogen lamp for all those scratchcard games where, for example, you have to scratch off the ‘correct’ few panels from those on the card. Many of these cards are very poorly manufactured, and a strong lamp will soon pay for itself many times over. If an item includes a time of manufacture on the packaging, only ever select one that’s been timed during office hours. A security manager or other company bigwig will probably witness the issue of really big prizes, and chances are they won’t do it in the middle of the night! Never buy a promotional pack at the very start of the competition, as it’s a fair guess that the major prizes won’t be released straight away. And if ever you are lucky enough to come across a winning pack, note down the batch code, time of manufacture etc. EXACTLY and think seriously about going back to the shop and buying up the rest of the batch containing the same coding. It’s amazing how often winning packs appear en masse, seemingly having not been shuffled up at all!
A word of warning. Don’t rush to the supermarket having read this article, thinking that you’ve discovered the Holy Grail! The odds of finding a winning pack in any instant win promotion are small, even if you know exactly what you’re looking for. Never underestimate the number of packs that a popular product sells during the course of a promotion – in the USA, where it’s a legal requirement to print the winning odds on an instant win pack, I’ve seen odds of 125,000,000-1 and more stated. So you’re still looking for a needle in a very large haystack, even though you may know exactly what the needle looks like!
Finally, if all else fails there’s often a ‘No Purchase Necessary’ route available. And I think you can even try to weight this in your favour too. I always apply towards the end of a promotion, when all of the promotional packs have gone from the shelves. Promoters by then will have a clearer idea of how many prizes have been claimed, and may prefer to award the remainder rather than being left with a warehouse full of merchandise or – worse still – having to explain to irate customers why there were so few winners.
However you choose to approach it, good luck in your quest for winstant success. But most importantly – have fun!
A quick look at many ‘instant win’ promotions that have run since this article was originally written show a new trend. No straightforward win or lose messages, but complex codes that need some extra effort to resubmit via text or web. We compers are at an advantage with this new generation of promotion, since most members of the general public are unwilling or unable to jump through the increasing number of hoops that promoters put in our way. But we must still display some care with these newer games. Will every code that’s entered go into a draw, with all prizes being given away? Or have ‘winning’ codes been pre-determined, and prizes only paid out if and when a winning code is returned? Take 2005’s ‘iPod Every 5 Minutes’ promotion on Walkers Crisps as an example. This was a straightforward, honest draw, with all codes having an equal chance at the time of entry and all 9,000-odd prizes being awarded. But under the present law, it would have been perfectly legal for Walkers to have decided on 9,000 winning codes beforehand, and only award prizes when those particular codes, out of the hundreds of millions in play, were redeemed. Worse still they could even have pre-selected a specific winning code for each 5-minute draw, and only paid out if that code was entered at its allotted time. Again, all perfectly legal. Such a tactic would have reduced Walkers 9,000 iPod payout to, most likely, none at all – but this interpretation of the rules is starting to creep in, so always be careful. If the comp blurb tells us that prizes “will” or “must” be won, then it’s most likely OK. But if prizes only “can” be won, or are available “to” be won, then think twice. And if the value of a prize pool seems ridiculously high, perhaps sometimes running into the millions, alarm bells should again start ringing. Remember the old adage – if something seems too good to be true, then it most likely is!
As comping fashions change, technology improves, and sales promotion techniques become ever more scientific, it’s impossible to know how relevant the original Smidding article above, or even this update, will be in another few years time. I was reading just the other day that one of the most popular new gadgets in Japan, for example, is a mobile phone with a barcode reader that can be used to instantly enter competitions, print coupons and the like. Comping will always be with us in one form or another, indeed some people reading this might even be jumping for joy at the thought of instant wins biting the dust. We can never know what’s around the corner in this great, diverse hobby of ours. Which is one of the reasons why we love it so much!
Smid On… Till Receipts
The humble till receipt is surrounded by much myth and legend in comping circles. Understandable I suppose, given that it’s now the preferred ‘proof of purchase’ for most promoters. It’s obvious to most of us that without a “proper” till receipt a competition entry will fall at the first hurdle. But as well as its role as basic proof that you’ve actually bought the product that you’re supposed to have done, there are some tricks that a comper can use to make a till receipt work in their favour in other ways.
Compers often complain that a till receipt is required at all. After all, back in the halcyon days of comping this was never the case. Tokens or labels always sufficed, and it made our lives much simpler. We didn’t have to visit a particular store, and all of our comping shopping could be done at once without the embarrassment of having to pay in half a dozen separate transactions as an ever-lengthening and increasingly irate queue builds up behind us. But back in the “good old days”, a till receipt wouldn’t have been much use to a promoter as the information on it would have been minimal. Chances are, it wouldn’t even have been itemised. Things are far different these days of course, and the reasons that a promoter asks for a till receipt probably go beyond simply wanting proof that you’ve bought a particular product. Think about a ‘typical’ till receipt. It gives the store name, date of purchase and – of course – a reasonably detailed list of all the products you bought. But in the right hands, it tells the company running a competition much more than that. From looking at the items purchased, a company can tell whether you have children or pets, whether you tend to buy own-brand or premium products, whether you succumb to multisave offers, use coupons, have a credit card…. The list of possibilities is endless, and to one of the many market research companies specialising in this area that are out there, this information is worth its weight in gold. They’d normally have to invest a lot of money and resources to get such a detailed snapshot of someone’s shopping habits, but here they can get it almost for free. Add to all this data the demographic information that you’ve kindly supplied on the entry form and – jackpot! This is why till receipts have become the ‘proof of purchase’ of choice for most promoters these days, and why they usually have to be complete.
So, we’ve determined why promoters love till receipts. The next question must be – what can we, as compers, do to make a till receipt work in our favour? Most of the following suggestions are probably common sense, but you won’t do your chances any harm by trying to stick to them.
Always try to send a ‘realistic’ receipt
By realistic, I mean trying to make sure that it looks like you’re a genuine shopper. A receipt with just one item on it – the product that you needed to buy for the competition – won’t get you disqualified. But it won’t score you any Brownie points either. It could flag you up as a ‘professional’ comper, and any representative from the store who’s on the judging panel might not be too impressed either! So, always try to send in a receipt with at least two or three other products on it – more if possible, and don’t be too concerned about keeping your precious proof of purchase in pristine condition. Typical till receipts get shoved into purses or pockets or are left languishing in the bottom of shopping bags. So there’s really no need to treat yours like a forensic specimen!
Always send a ‘relevant’ receipt
Relevant to the product and the prize. If the comp is on baby food for example, try to get a few other baby products on the receipt as well to ‘prove’ that you really do have a baby (even if you don’t!). If a promoter chooses to run a competition on baby food, then their ‘target’ customer should be obvious. So don’t disappoint them. If a promotion is spread over a range of products, and you choose to enthuse about one product in particular in your tiebreaker, then make sure your receipt is for that particular item. You don’t want to appear disloyal or hypocritical by saying that the promoter’s chicken pie is all you ever eat… and then including a receipt for the steak and kidney variety! If the prize is a family holiday, include a few obvious ‘family’ items on the receipt. Try to send a subliminal message to the promoters – yes, you do have a family and this prize will be appreciated. Don’t alienate a promoter by making it appear that you have only begrudgingly bought their product because you had to. This can sometimes seem the case if a qualifier is at complete odds with other items on a receipt. So if a competition is on cheese, for example, surround the qualifying purchase with cream crackers, pickled onions, chutneys, or that nice new cheeseboard you’ve been promising yourself. This suggests to the promoter that you intend putting their product to good use - as the glorious centrepiece of a veritable banquet no less. And, on the rare occasions these days where you can actually choose your store of purchase, again try to think logically.
A competition run by The Times, for example, might benefit from a Waitrose or Sainsburys receipt. But the judges of a comp on processed peas offering, say, the chance to live in luxury for a weekend, might be more sympathetic to the Asda receipt full of basic and own brand lines. Why should somebody who shops at Waitrose or Harrods win their competition, as they clearly live in relative luxury already!
Always send a ‘rapturous’ receipt
Show the promoter how much you love them and their product. If you’re asked to send a receipt showing one purchase then, cost permitting, make it two or three instead. Try to ensure that their products are at the very top of your receipt, because you subconsciously wanted them so much that you took them out of your trolley first of course! Avoid competitors’ products on the receipt at all costs. This is difficult these days I know since the big multinational companies have their fingers in so many pies, but try to read the small print on products to find out who ‘really’ makes them. Walker’s crisps are owned by Pepsi for example, so always try to avoid putting a can of Coke on any Walkers till receipt. Better still, surround your Walkers crisps purchase with Pepsi, 7Up, and other Walkers snacks.
Time now for an exercise, to put my comments into context. You are a member of a judging panel. Two entries are completely tied together for first prize. The actual entries are now in front of you, complete with till receipts, for you to make a final decision and, at the same time, for you to check that all entry requirements have been met. (A proper audit is essential at this stage in case of problems later.) Both entries are of equal quality, with nothing to choose between them. You look at each entry form, and then the accompanying till receipt. Each receipt shows the necessary proof of purchase and is therefore perfectly valid.
a) You represent the supermarket running the competition. One of the receipts is a foot long, the other shows just one item. Which entry would you prefer to see win?
b) You represent the manufacturer. One receipt shows several items from your product range and those of a sister company, the other just one item and that is sandwiched between two of your main competitor’s brands. Which entry would you prefer?
c) You represent the advertising agency, who have been desperately trying to make the product attractive to young families. One of the receipts includes nappies, kids meals and a comic. The other shows the purchase of a pair of surgical stockings and The Peoples Friend. Which would be your choice?
d) You represent the handling house, which has been running promotions for several clients all with the same prize package that the various winners will take together – a clubbing weekend in Ibiza. One receipt includes a lads mag, trendy deodorant and lager. The other, a copy of the Daily Telegraph and a bottle of milk stout. And your preference would be?
So there you have it. Realistic. Relevant. Rapturous. The Three Rs of TRs.
Try your best to ensure that a till receipt meets these rules, and it won’t do you any harm. I fully appreciate, of course, that we can never know exactly how a competition is going to be judged or administered. Till receipts may simply get a cursory glance from a disinterested clerk in the postroom, and might not even make it to the judges’ table. But the point is, we can never know exactly what will happen once our precious entry is dropped into the post box. So always try to think about little things that, while they might not be guaranteed to bring you success, they certainly won’t work against you. Even if something might only increase your chances by a minuscule percentage, it’s got to be worth a try. Especially if the cost to you in time and money is minimal, if anything at all. It’s often said that “you can’t please everybody all of the time”. But in the wonderful world of comping, you certainly have to try!
Smid On… Christmas Comping
We compers know that Christmas is invariably the busiest time of the year for our hobby, and having to juggle all of the extra competitions along with the other pressures that December brings can be a nightmare. OK, so there are presents to wrap, the family to see, and a turkey twice the size of your oven to attempt to cook. But what about the fact that the shops are absolutely packed with people getting in the way of precious entry forms and buying up all of those special competition packs without even noticing (tut tut)? The checkout queues, meaning even more dirty looks than usual when you ask for all of those separate receipts? The daily advent competitions? The postal delays? We compers certainly see things from a different perspective… until the last December entry has been posted off, anyway. Then we can finally settle down to enjoy the fun with everyone else.
It’s a pity that the busiest time of the year for our hobby is also the busiest time of the year for most people generally. It makes December one big, mad rush, and in many ways detracts from the fun.
There is a school of thought that tells us to make a real effort to enter comps in the run up to Christmas, simply because ‘normal’ people (and the more disorganised compers!) don’t have the time or inclination. I think that this is true to some extent, but ultimately I think that the benefits are minimal. While the quantity of entries may indeed decrease, the quality certainly does not as the more serious compers step up their efforts in response to the perceived ‘better chance’. But there’s no harm in trying to be more organised at this time of the year to at least give yourself a fighting chance of entering as many comps as possible. Buy your qualifiers early, before the mad rush in the shops, and plan ahead to beat the Christmas post and the delays it inevitably brings. One particularly important rule at this time of the year is to buy your on-pack qualifiers as soon as you see them. This is always a good idea anyway, but is absolutely essential at Christmas when stock disappears from shelves very, very fast. Seasonal lines, alcohol and confectionery especially should be bought as soon as they are seen – stores might not stock the product at all after Christmas!
Slogan-wise, whatever your views on ‘chestnuts’ (i.e. unoriginal sentences that win prizes over and over again) for the other eleven months of the year, in December everything is somehow different. As the entire country slides into one big tacky Christmas cliché in the name of tradition, it only seems polite to join in the jollity. Time pressures too make a Christmas chestnut somehow more acceptable. And given that Christmas is based on custom and habit for most of us, it seems only reasonable to make blowing the dust off of your “Bumper Book of Christmas Chestnuts” every year one of those family customs without which Christmas wouldn’t be complete. Some Christmas slogans may make you groan, then again so does that huge pudding after Christmas lunch that nobody can eat year after year… but you can imagine the uproar if ever it failed to appear? Christmas is all about familiarity and tradition, and there’s no reason why your Christmas tiebreakers shouldn’t follow suit – even with a heavy dose of irony and with tongue very firmly in cheek (or so you can claim, anyway)!
So, stuff the turkey and hang the holly, yule sleigh the judges in your quest for santa-rrific prizes that’ll give you Claus for celebration. Every one’s a cracker. Like Mistletoe and wine, the product that you’re praising is always number one at Christmas time. And of course, you bought it at a supermarket where prices are never ding dong merrily on high. The stable prices and star value makes their store the inn place to go, for festive good cheer they never reign dear, and it goes without sleighing that they tend their flocks but never fleece them. Yule love their prices (which, incidentally, sleigh you and even make Scrooge smile), and it’s the very store where Santa always does his stocking up. Wise men travel there from afar too; indeed only a turkey would shop anywhere else. Sauces and gravy undoubtedly offer the condiments of the season, and with that stuffing there’s no present like the thyme. The product about which you are enthusing invariably carries the most distinguished label on the festive table, is a great Christmas box (poles apart from ties and socks) and, hark those herald angels sing, at Christmas time it’s just the thing! In fact, you’re plum chuffed about it – and would be plum duffed without it.
I could go on, but don’t want to snow you under. I’m sure you get the idea, but if you would rather not join the doubtless hundreds of others piled on the chestnut bandwagon (or should that be sleigh?) as it teeters along its slippery path, then there’s plenty of scope for you to adapt one of these clichés and make it your own. Even easier if your name is Carol, Holly, Ivy or Noel – praise the comping gods at this time of the year if you are so blessed! It’s all in a good Claus, after all.
An unashamed Christmas slogan works best when the judges too are in the festive spirit, so it’s best to use them in competitions that will be judged before the big day. I can think of nothing worse than having to judge thousands of jolly seasonal slogans on a cold, wet Monday in February, so always take the closing and notification dates into account when deciding how thick to pile on the festive cheer. And then sit back and wait for those Christmas prizes to start rolling in… a ritual which itself is another unique quirk in a comper’s calendar. A sure sign of Easter in a comping household is when the postman turns up with all of the hampers, crackers and decorations won in Christmas competitions. But that’s another story, and frankly who cares? A prize is a prize, after all!
Smid On… Finding Your Level
One question that I’m often asked is “how many competitions should I be entering each month?” To which the answer is invariably “how long is a piece of string”! I suppose that the simple answer to our conundrum is that comping, like any hobby, must be enjoyable. And the moment that it stops being enjoyable for whatever reason, then this is a good time to look closely at your approach. There’s no need to abandon comping completely of course, but in a hobby as diverse as ours there are so many different paths that you can take. It’s simply a case of finding the right one for you. Easy!
The general advice for someone just starting out is to enter as many competitions as possible, especially those with lots of prizes. This is a good strategy for a beginner, since it gets them into the swing of things and will hopefully provide a confidence boost when one or two prizes (at least!) turn up. Likewise, someone dipping their toes into the wonderful world of tiebreaker comps for the first time will probably benefit from an initial torrent of entries concentrating on promotions with lots of prizes. If all goes to plan, this should result in the opportunity to hone skills and learn the ropes while at the same time reaping a few modest rewards to keep the confidence going.
But this approach is fraught with dangers. Human nature being what it is, if this ‘quantity’ strategy leads to lots of prizes, then a comper might simply enter more and more comps in an attempt to increase the prize count. And if it results in no prizes at all, then surely by entering even more comps your luck must change. Mustn’t it?!
Whether it be trying to perpetuate a winning streak, or attempting to cover your losses, you could soon find yourself on a slippery slope. This is how bookmakers make their money, and I could at this point trot out the old clichés about you never seeing a poor bookie – and that it’s no accident that they always have three paying in windows but only one paying out window! Some people will argue, of course, that comping most certainly isn’t the same as gambling. A fair point, but it is similar in many respects. The purchase of a qualifier is effectively your stake, and the completion of your entry will invariably involve you ‘playing the odds’ in your favour – be it with a brilliant slogan or even a nicely decorated postcard. As with ‘real’ gambling the time and money spent on our hobby can soon add up, and this is where the problems can start.
I think that most compers have, at some time, been down this “quantity over quality” path. Sometimes as a deliberate strategy, but sometimes purely accidentally. You usually only realise that something is wrong when you have a house full of unopened qualifiers that “will come in handy one day” – even worse when those qualifiers are things like household appliances filling up your spare room! The arrival of a prize is no longer accompanied by excitement, probably because you have no use (or space!) whatsoever for it, and you’re simply ‘winning for winning’s sake’. You’re spending so long on your entries that you have no time for anything else. You start missing closing dates, start panicking, and you suddenly realise that comping isn’t fun any more. You can also find yourself completely losing your sense of proportion. Never mind that terrible flood that devastated a town and destroyed the homes and livelihoods of hundreds of people… wasn’t there a handling house nearby?! Hopefully your precious competition entries didn’t get too soggy, and surely a few feet of water won’t delay deliveries or the judging too much! Basically, the word ‘competition’ becomes the most important thing to you. It matters not that the qualifier is costly and unwanted, that the prize is useless, or that the odds of winning are infinitesimal. Before long, you find yourself trawling half of the country for an elusive entry form simply “because it exists”, and buying any product or publication with ‘WIN’ on the outside. If it’s a competition, then as a comper you are obliged to enter it.
Does this all sound horribly familiar?
The twin enemies of compers finding themselves in this position are time and money. It’s an obvious concern if you start spending more money than you can afford. It’s always a good idea to set aside a budget specifically for your comping activities, since costs can have a habit of mounting up without you realising it. Even if you only do ‘free’ draws, for example, there’s postage and stationery to think about it. Plus the cost of magazine subscriptions, entry form suppliers, internet, phone and text costs… it soon adds up! Whatever your budget, it’s obviously important that you stick to it.
It’s equally important that you manage your time effectively. It’s no use if you spend so long looking for comps, finding forms, buying qualifiers etc. that you don’t have any time left to actually sit down and do the competitions properly. Chances are, you’re never going to think up an unbeatable, original tiebreaker if you only get around to looking at a batch of twenty entry forms the day before their closing date. At first, this might not be a problem since your ‘quantity’ approach means that you’re entering fifty chestnuts or, at best, lacklustre and unfinished originals a month so you’re statistically likely to scoop one or two prizes purely by default. But this can soon become an unfulfilling chore, and when you hit a dry patch (and every comper does) the effects and general disillusionment are always magnified because of the time and money you have frantically – and sometimes by this stage, grudgingly - invested.
Thankfully, these periods of comp-ulsion (groan) rarely last forever. You soon reach a time when the money and/or the time simply runs out. But it’s not necessary for you to throw in the comping towel completely once you’ve been made to see the light. You simply have to readjust your strategy so that the hobby suits you. You must control the comping… and not the other way round!
It can sometimes be difficult to make the initial ‘break’ and to actually start ignoring competitions, but be selective you must. This means only entering competitions where you can reasonably make use of a qualifier, and where the prize is actually wanted. If you think that you might sell a prize or pass it on to friends or family, make sure that the rules of the competition allow this and that winning won’t lead to even more time and money being wasted. Also, be sensible and realistic when gauging the chances of your winning a prize in a particular competition.
I appreciate that we all have to start somewhere, and that practice makes perfect etc., but the chances are that if you’ve never written a winning slogan in your life then you’ll not break your duck in a competition where there’s just one prize, especially if you can only afford to allocate five minutes of your precious time to the task anyway. So perhaps build up slowly to these, and use the time and resources that you save to concentrate on more modest targets. It’s often a good idea to limit the number of tiebreakers that you write in a month in any event. You can then put more time and effort into them, and less pressure should mean that you get into a particular ‘mindset’ easier which should hopefully result in ideas coming together faster and better. A quick glance through a few comping books on my bookshelf suggests that the ‘optimum’ number of tiebreaker comps that you should enter in a month ranges from just one to a maximum of six. So, even the ‘experts’ disagree – which means that once again you should go with your own feelings and stick with a figure that makes you happy. But clearly it’s best that a realistic limit of some sort is adhered to, on this all of the experts most definitely agree.
Comping has without doubt changed over the last few years, and the hobby can quite easily take over your life if you let it. Back in the ‘good old days’ there were fewer comps, with fewer variations and fewer entry routes. The hobby could still take up lots of time, but in a more ‘fulfilling’ way. Many comps had more challenging tasks, and without the internet or as many widely available solution magazines as there are today, this invariably meant regular trips to the library. And while you were looking for a particular fact, you’d almost certainly stumble across something even more fascinating so would spend ages reading a completely different book to the one that you originally went in for!
The internet, and especially search engines which take you straight to the information you want, mean that such pleasant – and rewarding – detours are things of the past sadly, but today’s comper still needs to be aware of more modern diversions. From the dilemma of deciding whether the instant win, postal, phone, text, or web entry route affords the best chance of winning, to agonising over whether printed postcards are preferable to handwritten ones. And with chatrooms and newsgroups on the web, it’s easier than ever to find out about hundreds of competitions… unfortunately, you may find yourself spending so long talking about them with your new found friends online that you don’t have any time to actually enter them! At the other end of the web spectrum, a quick look at one or two of the major comping websites and newsgroups will reveal a world of ‘bulk’ comping. Nothing but a huge list of competitions, and woe betide anyone who doesn’t include a direct link straight to a comp page and the accompanying answers to save those precious seconds! A world where one click will fill in an entire entry form for you, or will automatically generate an email to enable you to enter a comp. Actually, make that 200 emails since you’ve very cunningly created hundreds of different email addresses to improve your chances.
All very well, of course, until that fictitious cat of yours wins a non-transferable dream holiday!
Smid On… A Level Playing Field?
Comping can sometimes seem to be “so UNFAIR!!” – if you allow it, of course. I can’t think of any other hobby where you must ‘grin and bear it’ and ‘live and let live’ as much as ours.
If you work, then it’s ‘not fair’ that others have more time than you do. And if you don’t work, then it’s ‘not fair’ that others have more money. If you’re a man, then the latest competition on ladies’ perfume is ‘not fair’. If you’re a woman, all of the beer comps are ‘not fair’. Chocolate comps are ‘not fair’ if you’re on a diet, local comps are ‘not fair’ if you don’t live in the area, comps needing bottle tops are ‘not fair’ if you’re not a barman. Internet comps are ‘not fair’ if you don’t have a computer, phone comps are ‘not fair’ if you don’t have a phone, premium rate phone comps are ‘not fair’ if your office bars the numbers. One entry per household is ‘not fair’ since other compers always seem to be able to use more additional addresses than you. Compers who choose to keep themselves to themselves are ‘not fair’ since they should be helping others. And compers who choose to share are ‘not fair’ since a group’s combined resources will always give them the advantage over an individual working alone. Tiebreaker comps are ‘not fair’ since – well, you’re rubbish at them and that same bloke always seems to win. And, as for that winners list you’ve just seen, how ‘not fair’ was that? What were the judges thinking?!
I could go on, but I’m sure you get my drift. If we allowed every apparent injustice to get to us, we’d tear ourselves apart. Which is why, I suppose, comping in the main attracts the type of person that it does. Someone who’s able to forgive and forget, let go and move on. Someone who can laugh off the apparent ‘unfairness’ of it all, and instead focus on the positive aspects of our hobby. Of which – let’s be honest – there are absolutely loads!
As compers, we have no alternative but to accept what promoters throw at us. Companies don’t run competitions for our benefit after all (although it’s sometimes easy to forget this!), so we must be prepared to fit in with what a promoter wants and expects and not the other way round.
The old days of ‘answers on a postcard’ are long gone. In this age of customer profiles, demographics and databases, it’s easier than ever for a company to identify a specific target audience and tailor a promotion accordingly. If that means an internet or text comp designed to appeal to the younger consumer, or a simple instant-win aimed at the far-too-busy-to-enter-a-real-competition housewife, then we must go along with that. No amount of yearning for the ‘good old days’ is going to change anything – and as much as some of us protest, the days of really challenging comps that took weeks and even months to solve, or the really deserving winning tiebreaker that’s such a clever play on words that it takes you a fortnight to work it all out, are behind us. And if by some fluke we did come up with the most brilliant original slogan since ‘experts perfect them…’, the inexperienced judging panels that we seemingly have to endure these days would still miss it and give the top prize instead to – well, ‘experts perfect them…’ probably!
It’s just ‘not fair’! And never will be. So learn to live with it, and don’t let it get to you.
Try to stay positive, choose competitions that play to your own individual strengths, and steer clear of anything where you think – for whatever reason – that you’ll be at a disadvantage. There’s plenty out there to choose from. If you go into a competition having already written off your chances, then what's the point? If you’re convinced at the outset that you’re not going to win a particular comp, then you’re never going to muster the confidence or extra spark to do the task justice and your subsequent failure to feature on the Winners List becomes an inevitable, self-fulfilling prophecy. So stick with what you’re good at and leave the rest for others to pick over.
It’s not compulsory for a comper to enter every comp they find out about. Honest! Especially if there’s no real desire, or need, of the prize. But surely ANY prize can be sold, gifted or otherwise recycled and hence can never be ‘unwanted’? Well, not necessarily!
I appreciate that, with smaller prizes, these will doubtless have a resale value if nothing else. And, while the idea of trying for a prize that you don’t want simply “because it’s there” or to convert it to cash – thus depriving someone who genuinely would have appreciated the prize – is abhorrent to some, I appreciate that it is a valid strategy for others. Even just a couple of pounds here and there will buy some more stamps, after all. But winning a larger prize really can be fraught with problems, and if on reading the Rules of a competition you think to yourself those immortal words “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it”, then alarm bells should immediately start ringing. How exactly are you going to ‘cross the bridge’ of going on a non-transferable, fixed date, eight week round-the-world cruise for two if you’re a martyr to seasickness, there’s four of you and you only get four weeks leave at work? Or suddenly producing that driving licence or passport that you don’t possess, even though it was a requirement when entering the competition? Or turning into a twelve year-old girl who really wants to meet Girls Aloud when you are, in fact, a world-weary fifty year-old man who only ever listens to Radio 3? The worst case scenario, you may think, would be that you get to show how generous you are by graciously handing the prize back to be re-drawn, or donated to charity. Well, think again because some promoters won’t even allow that and will simply not award the prize at all. So, everybody loses out except the multinational conglomerate who’ve ended up getting loads of publicity from a competition without having to cough up anything at the end of it! Beware too of thinking that you might simply pick and choose certain elements of a prize, and forgo the rest. You know, for example, that you’ll never be able to go on the aforementioned dream cruise, but the £10,000 spending money sounds good. All very well until you discover that the money is waiting for you on the boat, or at your first port of call, or will be reimbursed at the end of the trip on production of the relevant receipts! The only thing worse than not winning a prize is winning it and then having it taken away from you. Snatched back relatively quickly and painlessly if you’re lucky, dragged away kicking and screaming leaving you disappointed, out of pocket and with plenty of egg on your face if you’re not. So why take the risk in the first place?
We compers have plenty of things to do to fill our time. So be selective, concentrate on winning the prizes that you know for certain you want and will enjoy, and you’ll probably find that the pressure starts to ease a little. Ideally of course, there shouldn’t be any pressure anyway since we should all be enjoying our hobby. Shouldn’t we?!
Smid On… Handling Houses
Many of you have asked me: what preferences and traits do the different major handling houses have? Sadly, in today’s comping world this is an impossible question to answer with any degree of certainty. The modern handling house is a completely different beast compared to the one of old, and so it’s not a good idea to apply a particular formula to a particular address. For a start, you’re probably not even going to know what the handling house’s precise role in a promotion is these days. It might just be a ‘mail drop’, whose sole task is to collect all of the entries for a competition together in one place and then send them on elsewhere for processing and judging. It might carry out the processing and data collection, but not the judging. Then again, it might deal with every aspect of a competition including the judging and even beyond to the fulfilment stage, awarding prizes and sending out winners’ lists. Chances are, we as mere compers are never going to know what exactly will happen to our precious entries and how many different departments and pairs of hands they’re likely to pass through. So it’s dangerous to try to appeal to one particular handling house by, say, modelling a tiebreaker on a style that was successful in an earlier competition run at that same address. The handling house’s remit and input may be completely different the second time around, your research will thus be fundamentally flawed, and your painstakingly targeted slogan will fall on stony ground.
It hasn’t always been like this, of course. Before the dawn of sophisticated databases, outsourcing and other ever-changing fashionable buzzwords, we compers always knew that the big handling houses would more than likely deal with every aspect of a competition, right from its initial conception all the way through to the bitter end. Staff turnover seemed low, with the same names cropping up on judging panels and at the bottom of winners’ letters. You got the feeling that these were a small band of dedicated ‘professional’ judges, who would be involved at every judging session arranged by that company. Of course there would be independent judges, but these would be properly guided and influenced by the professionals. As a result, handling houses in the good old days tended to develop a ‘house style’. If you could somehow tap into that, and a company’s particular preferences, then the prizes would start rolling in. This is the reason why, if you look at old slogan books from the 80s and earlier, the name of the handling house dealing with the competition is often listed with some prominence. That way, you could keep track of the type of slogans that particular companies were favouring, and take note of any subtle changes that came along.
This is not possible nowadays. Handling houses tend to be vast places, with different, often inexperienced staff dealing with different promotions. And the level of input that a handling house has in actually judging a competition can rarely be determined.
As marketing becomes more and more of an exact science, we can never know what a promoter’s precise targets and aims are when they run a particular promotion. How much say will they demand in the final results? Will any factors other than simply the best slogan determine the winner? If a promoter suddenly decides to focus on the health benefits of a product rather than its flavour, say, then that list of winning slogans from a competition that they ran on exactly the same product just a month ago when ‘taste’ was the keyword, using exactly the same handling house, and exactly the same lead-in sentence, becomes immediately irrelevant and obsolete. So judging standards seem to be inconsistent and sometimes, frankly, downright poor. Marketing moves so fast these days, that any romantic notions of handling houses calling the shots and insisting that competitions stay independent and ‘in house’, remaining true to traditions of the promoter that have remained unchanged for generations, must sadly be forgotten.
Many older compers reading this probably remember the old Ray Smith handling house (PO Box 9B, East Molesey… ah, my eyes are misting over already!). This was a handling house of the ‘old school’, which dealt with hundreds of comps from many of the big names. Everything that company did was scrupulously fair, and a comment that Ray once made in an interview has always stuck with me. He said that he was beginning to notice a change in promoters’ attitudes to competitions. Whereas in the past they would have been happy to let a handling house just get on with it, they were now demanding more of a say. For example, some companies – even seemingly reputable ones – would try to insist that ‘no purchase’ entries in a draw were overlooked in favour of paid-for entries. Ray would always refuse, but I’ve often wondered since then how many other handling houses would be so conscientious and immune from such pressures – especially in today’s more cynical business environment, with multi-million pound contracts at stake!
Not every handling house today is a massive warehouse on an inhospitable industrial estate (sorry – “business park”!) in the middle of nowhere, of course. There are still some smaller concerns out there, and some promoters even occasionally try to run a competition themselves. And these are the kind of competitions where we can probably make more of an impact if we try to tailor our entries. A promoter running their own competition will often have little experience, and so a more ‘formulaic’ slogan (dare I say “chestnut”!) may do well. A handling house looking at entry forms all day every day should be able to identify and dismiss the more obvious chestnuts (although you wouldn’t think it when you look at some winners’ lists!). But a small promoter dipping their toes into comping for the first time may well be truly bowled over by the uniquely original concept of “connoisseurs selecting” their “expertly perfected” products, or of the hilarious idea of their company “making men too”! So, a hoary old chestnut or mundane couplet can indeed be a valid strategy in these cases.
One step up from the DIY promoters, we have the smaller handling house – or ‘consultancy’ as it might grandly label itself. This company will perhaps administer competitions quite often, so should still be able to filter out the more obvious chestnuts. But, with a smaller staff and more consistent ‘hands on’ approach, it might be possible to identify a few patterns from comp to comp. A good example of this was Colourways in Hertford, who used to handle many of the Walkers competitions among others. Their winners’ lists often favoured rhyming slogans that mentioned store, product and prize, so it was always a good idea when you saw their address to try something along the lines of “dreaming of (prize) my family adores, buying my (product) at (shop name) stores”. OK, something much, much better than that, but I’m sure you get the idea! But time moves on, they’ve probably ALREADY completely adjusted their brief, so you’ll probably be on a hiding to nothing nowadays anyway. Which only serves to illustrate just how uncertain and temporary this kind of strategy can be.
So, my advice to anyone thinking about trying to “second guess” the mechanics of a handling house or a judging process is simply – don’t!
There are just too many unknowns and inconsistencies in today’s promotions and fulfilment industry to make such a strategy robust or sensible. By all means try a couple of slogans that you think, based on your “studying the form” of previous winners’ lists, might give you an advantage. But don’t depend on it! You should always submit at least one “personal” slogan too. One that you’ve constructed in your usual way, that stands on its own two feet and that you feel good about for all of the right reasons. And without any thoughts of tweaking or adapting it to fit – so you think – a particular template or formula that probably doesn’t even exist. Easier said than done, of course – so good luck!
Smid On… The Odds of Winning a Prize
Trying to work out the odds of winning a prize in a particular competition these days is notoriously difficult. There are so many different factors that can affect the number of entries in a promotion. Method(s) of entry, distribution of entry forms, cost and availability of qualifier, time until the closing date, the task itself – I could go on. And even when we think that we’ve arrived at a suitable ballpark figure, we’re constantly surprised (if and when such ‘market sensitive’ information is ever released, of course!) at how many or how few entries a specific competition attracted.
One area where it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that your chances of winning are greater than they actually are, is the ubiquitous instant win. It’s tempting (or should I say wishful thinking?!) to be lulled into a false sense of security by the promise of hundreds of thousands – even millions – of prizes. But having said that, as long as you don’t allow yourself to be carried away by their alluring promises, instant win promotions are probably the easiest for you to dissect and come up with a reasonably accurate calculation of winning odds. You’ll probably need to search around a bit for all of the information that you need, and the end result might only be an intelligent guesstimate rather than a definitive figure, but it’s usually a relatively straightforward task.
In many other countries, it’s the law that the odds of winning an instant win prize are printed on the pack. This is useful information, although it can sometimes be rather daunting to be confronted by the fact that “your chances of winning a prize in this promotion are 1 in 125,000,000”. But the truth often hurts – and just because we don’t have the benefit of such detail here in the UK, it doesn’t necessarily mean that our chances are any better!
Since UK promoters aren’t legally obliged to show their hand with a declaration of odds, it goes without saying that most don’t do so voluntarily out of the kindness of their hearts! But it can often be easier than you think to work out a reasonably realistic figure yourself with a bit of detective work. The trade press (‘The Grocer’ and ‘Campaign’ magazines, for example), and ‘Trade’ areas of company websites will often detail the ‘boring’ technicalities of a promotion – when it’s due to hit the shelves, how long it’s scheduled to last etc. And those same sources, along with certain business websites (type “(name of product) UK sales” or something similar into a search engine and you’ll see what I mean!), will often give some indication of sales figures or turnover for a particular brand. If you can find out this basic “time and turnover” information – and it’s not always easy! – then arriving at some reasonably accurate odds shouldn’t be too difficult.
The resulting figure is sometimes surprising, and is often disappointing. Take two past, major promotions. Heinz were offering four houses, and Walkers crisps over sixteen million prizes – including 150 cars. Sounds good. The number of prizes in the Walkers comp must surely mean that you can’t lose, right? Wrong!!
The Heinz promotion was unusual in that they gave much more information in the small print than usual about prize distribution. When you read those details in conjunction with the sales volume of the participating brands gleaned from various websites, you arrived at a rough figure of 400 MILLION tins being sold during the promotion. Four hundred million tins, four prizes. You don’t have to be Einstein to translate this into odds of 100,000,000 to one against a tin being a winner. In other words, you’ll win the main jackpot on the National Lottery seven times before you win a Heinz house. Lady Luck works in mysterious ways of course, and people will be lucky. But don’t bet on it being you!
Turning to Walkers, the trade press told us that their promotion was to run for eight weeks. An internet search throws up several websites which tell us that Walkers sell around 15 million bags of crisps A DAY. Eight weeks is 56 days, 56 x 15,000,000 means 840,000,000 promotional packs, and 840 million packs puts the 16 million prizes on offer into stark perspective. In other words, even with such an enormous-sounding prize pool, the odds of your crisp bag being a winner were more than 50 to one against. And if that wasn’t bad enough, even if you did beat the odds and find a winning sachet, the odds of it containing anything better than a consolation prize of a free bag of crisps were a minuscule one in 106,000. In fact, ignoring the free crisps altogether (the last thing that many of us who ‘embraced’ this particular promotion wanted was yet another bag of crisps, let’s be honest!), you’d have to buy around 5.5 million bags of crisps to have a fighting chance of a car. Crunch!
It’s important to never overestimate your chances of scooping an instant win prize. These two examples illustrate the enormous sales figures of popular brands, which is something you’d be wise to never forget. It’s very easy to get sucked into the ‘thrill of the chase’ for an instant win prize, when frankly the chances of you being struck by lightning whilst running around screaming, waving the winning pack, are better than you actually finding the winning pack in the first place!
The odds in an instant win competition are sometimes so outlandish that to spend time and money on any kind of strategy would be sheer folly. Make sure that the product is on your shopping list, obviously (you definitely won’t win otherwise!), but beyond that you can only put yourself at the mercy of fate’s fickle finger. Consider the Heinz comp again. One prize in every 100 million tins. That’s a lot of tins, and a lot of shops. Even if a winning tin had a special label pronouncing “I’M A WINNER!!”, which could only be seen through a pair of magic goggles that only you possessed, the chances of you being in the right place at the right time to find it are infinitesimal. A very small needle in a very large – UK sized! – haystack.
If you’re not able to find out the crucial “time and turnover” data, then it’s time for some educated guesswork. The period that a promotion will remain on-pack is notoriously difficult to predict. I’ve seen competitions come and go in less than a month, others seem to hang around forever. The closing date is rarely much help, as this tends to be based on the shelf life of the product and so can be months – even years – in the future, long after promotional stock has in reality disappeared from stores. As a rule of thumb though, a reasonable estimate for the length of time that a promotion stays on fresh goods or products with a short shelf life (crisps, bread etc.) will be typically one or two months, and for everything else three to six months. But look for other clues – a promotion to tie in with the forthcoming release of a film, for example, will most likely disappear soon after the release date. And if a product has featured a similar promotion before, then your memory of how long their previous one lasted can be a good indication.
Thinking about turnover, there’s the very simple “3,000 rule”. Ignoring corner shops and other smaller outlets, there are around 3,000 ‘major’ supermarkets in the UK. You probably shop in at least one of them. In other words, for every 3,000 prizes that an instant win promotion offers, the mathematical probability is that just one of those prizes will turn up in “your” supermarket. (The odds are actually longer than this when you take smaller stores into account, but for the sake of keeping this article as upbeat as possible we’ll stick at 3,000!) Taking this formula to its logical conclusion, if there are 1,000 prizes then only one in three supermarkets will sell a mere one, solitary winning pack. A hundred prizes (still very generous sounding, I know!) means that just one in thirty supermarkets will be on the winning trail – and so on. And if thinking about a promotion in these terms isn’t daunting enough, now you must stop and think about your ‘local’ chances. Even if you’re happy that your local store is likely to have a winning pack on its shelves, what are your chances of actually finding it? Reasonably good, you might think, if the competition is on an obscure product that seems to languish on the shelf out of sight and gathering dust for weeks on end (you know this because you’ve already liberated all of the neck collars from the bottles on display, and are impatiently awaiting a new batch!). But turn your thoughts to big sellers like bread, cereals, crisps, tea and coffee and the like – these positively walk out of the door, shelves are constantly being restocked to keep up with demand, daily sales at your store alone could run into the thousands. What price a winner now? When it comes to putting the chances of an instant win into some kind of realistic context, we compers should never underestimate the “power of 3,000”!
Of course, many compers dislike instant wins with a passion. Think of the excitement in the comping world, they argue, if a good old-fashioned tiebreaker comp ever offered 150 cars, or 4 houses, or £1,000,000. But this will never happen. Not only are instant wins seen as being more ‘inclusive’ by promoters nowadays (i.e. more people are attracted by the thought of getting something for little or no effort – a sad reflection of society generally!), but the prize count can be artificially ‘inflated’ to sound better than it realistically is. By law, a prize offered in a slogan comp or straightforward prize draw MUST be won. But with an instant win, the prize must only be MADE AVAILABLE to win. So if, for example, a promoter only wants to give away ten cars in an instant win, and knows from previous experience with similar promotions that typically only one in ten prizes are ever claimed, then they can trumpet WIN 100 CARS!! and be reasonably confident that only 10 or so will actually be claimed. They might even take out an insurance policy to cover them against ‘over-redemption’, or might engineer the odds in other ways. Printing the winning message at the bottom of an extremely messy tin, for example, ensuring that a kid’s juice carton can only be cut open with a state-of-the-art power tool, running a text and internet-based promotion on a product favoured by OAPs – that sort of thing! I’ve seen claim rates as low as 1 or 2% with the ‘new breed’ of instant wins that we’re currently having to endure. You know the ones I mean – nothing so straightforward as a ‘win’ or ‘lose’ message, but rather a hidden number that you then have to further check on a website or by phone. A sort of multi-task ‘double whammy’ if you like! But we compers can actually use this manipulation in our favour when it comes to weighing up our chances. As promotions get more contrived and claim rates get lower, promoters’ claims will get bigger. If a typical redemption rate goes as low as 1%, say, they’ll offer 100 cars in the almost certain knowledge that only one will be claimed. Or £1,000,000 in prizes, knowing that their actual payout will be nearer £10,000. But by law, they must still actually release all of the advertised prizes (and indeed must be able to prove that they have done so if requested by the authorities). They’re simply relying on complacency, confusion, or plain indifference on the part of many consumers to simply not check winning packs, try to collect winning sets, or whatever the task may be. And that’s where we step in. It goes without saying that we compers will check absolutely everything, and as promoters get more blasé and grander with their claims, then in theory there should be more potential winning packs out there for us to find. Not for us the 1% likelihood of a claim – we’re 100% likely! – so technically, our chances improve as manufacturers release more and more winning packs in the expectation that they’ll simply end up in a dustbin somewhere. So go on – beat them at their own game!
Smid On… Slogan Ethics
As most of us know, a “chestnut” is a slogan that crops up again and again on winners lists. Whatever our opinion on the subject, as compers we must acknowledge and accept that chestnuts are here to stay. While there are doubtless a few people out there who deliberately enter every single competition with an unashamed chestnut, I think that the vast majority of us try our best to be original. But this doesn’t preclude us from submitting the occasional conker! There’s no harm in trying, we might think, if we have a spare qualifier (at the very worst, we’ll be doing our comping duty by duplicating and thus cancelling out similar efforts). Or if certain elements of a comp make a chestnut seem a sensible strategy (inexperienced promoter, for example). Sometimes we might simply submit a chestnut by accident – a subliminal memory of a past winners list maybe, or a cracking “first thought” that will probably be a lot of other peoples first thought too.
I often receive questions on this subject, covering everything from definitions to etiquette, and in this article I’m going to try to answer as many of your queries as possible. I don’t pretend that this is a definitive “chestnut” article, as it’s led by your questions and they are a somewhat eclectic mix!
First up then, when is a chestnut not a chestnut? Well, opinions on this one differ. “Experts perfect them, connoisseurs select them” is clearly a chestnut – probably the best known and most quoted of them all. But would you see a slight variation of this most blatant example in a different light? “Sexperts perfect them…” for an Ann Summers comp perhaps? By doing this, you are attempting to make the slogan apt – albeit with the minimum of effort! – but would this be enough to stop the usual rolling of eyes when the winners list is published? Not that it matters two hoots what other people think, of course (you won, they didn’t, end of story). But clearly, there are many definitions of what is or isn’t a chestnut. Some people consider it to be a specific, particular group of words – they’ll be the ones who are the first to congratulate you on your “sexperts” variation. But others see a chestnut as a general idea that keeps on winning – “sexperts” won’t be good enough for them, and they’ll bemoan instead your blatant “perfect / select” couplet. We can apply the same criteria to most of the well-known chestnuts. Take another infamous example. In its unadorned generic chestnut form, it would be a fairly mundane “The prize excites me, the product delights me, hope you invite me”. But most compers, even the most lackadaisical chestnut plucker, will make the line apt (and probably even original!) by mentioning the actual prize, product and promoter. But even though you’ve made the effort, and have arrived at “Blackpool excites me, mushy peas delight me, hope Harrods invite me” (or whatever), does this make the sentence any less of a chestnut in most compers eyes? I think we all know the answer to that one!
The fact that most experienced compers refer to the oldest, hoariest chestnuts in an abbreviated form (“experts”…”made men too”…“excites/delights/invites”) illustrates, I think, that it’s a general idea rather than a specific phrase that achieves, at some point, chestnut status. Your killer slogan could be the most fantastically original, wonderfully clever opus ever, but if it alludes to a couplet or pun that’s won a prize before then you can expect the comments to start.
I deliberately didn’t say “complaints” there, because most compers accept that chestnuts are always going to keep on winning prizes. It’s all part of the game. It can sometimes be annoying when a winners list contains nothing but barefaced chestnuts, but these things happen and, in the true spirit of comping, you must simply forget about the apparent injustice of it all and move on. But not before making a mental note that that particular promoter might fall into the same trap next time, of course! And if you can’t beat ‘em……!
Another area of debate in the “chestnut” world is – when exactly does copying or adapting another slogan move from being theft or plagiarism of someone’s original work, to being an acceptable exploitation of something firmly in the public domain? It’s difficult to know where to draw the line, and don't forget that even the likes of “experts” and “made men too” were original slogans once! I can only hope that the original authors of these classics received some handsome rewards before others jumped on the bandwagon – but like it or not they’ve now crossed over into public ownership. Direct copying of an original, new winning slogan could, on the other hand, be seen differently by many compers. Again, I have no intention of passing judgement on whether this is unethical or unsporting – we all have our own opinions – but it’s a difficult area. For a slogan to achieve true chestnut status, it must win lots of competitions. Which means that at least a few people must be prepared to use the slogan when it’s arguably still at the ‘original’ stage. With such a classic Catch 22 situation, and such blurred indistinct boundaries, it’s not an argument that I intend getting involved in. Like so many other aspects of comping, it’s a subject about which you must make up your own mind and proceed in a manner with which you are comfortable. Just try not to impose your own values and opinions on others, live and let live, because otherwise that’s when the fighting starts!
Following on from the “when does a slogan become a chestnut” debate, we could argue that there’s a time when a chestnut becomes almost original again. If a historic slogan falls out of fashion and lies dormant for a while, the time will invariably come when, with a brief dusting down and an injection of newer, more contemporary references, an old chestnut once again becomes ripe for the picking. Consider “I’m no Krystal in suspenders, more like Pauline in Eastenders”. I might be wrong, but at the time of writing this I haven’t seen this blast from the past feature in any winners lists for a good while. The ‘Krystal’ bit would need some tweaking obviously (it’s a reference to the 80s soap opera ‘Dynasty’ for anyone too young to remember!) – perhaps replacing with one of the Hollyoaks characters or similarly glamorous current soap star – but the rest still stands up, twenty-odd years after the slogan first appeared. But, once a chestnut always a chestnut I suppose, and doubtless anything along these lines on a winners list even after such a long time away will still attract the customary hoots of derision from those of us with long memories.
From my own years of experience, I say that we should not judge chestnuts too harshly. In any case, any comper who claims never to have used or adapted one in a time of need is probably a liar (or at the very least has a most selective memory)! Chestnuts regularly win competitions which means, like it or not, that they are often just what a judge is looking for. And, snobbery aside, you’ll only ever win a competition if you give a judge what they’re looking for (an obvious statement, but one that you’d be wise never to forget!). You might be able to claim the moral high ground after slaving over an original slogan, but what location would you prefer… the aforementioned moral high ground or a nice sandy beach somewhere, complete with spending money?
Personally, I’m not averse to using the occasional chestnut. I’ve had plenty of my own original slogans stolen or adapted by others over the years after all, so it’s simply a case of ‘swings and roundabouts’ so far as I’m concerned! But then again, can we be sure that our claims of ‘original’ will always stand up anyway? Many ‘original’ slogans turn out to be either adaptations of earlier successes, or follow a similar style, template or idea. Some could inadvertently duplicate (or at least pay homage to!) past winners without the writer even realising it. There’s no law against two people having the same idea after all.
Chestnuts are – and, like it or not, always will be – a feature of comping. Ignore (or, worse still, haughtily dismiss) them at your peril. They’ll always impact on you, either as an occasional or regular user yourself, or as someone who tries their best to steer clear of them only to be beaten to a prize by one with alarming regularity. There’s no right or wrong opinion on the subject – but can giving a promoter exactly what they want really be that unfair or unethical? The particular circumstances of a competition sometimes means that a chestnut is an acceptable strategy anyway, and for someone just starting out in our hobby a chestnut or two can give a great confidence boost and kick start their own original ideas. So, chestnuts aren’t all bad – and let’s be brutally honest, they’ve probably won a prize or three in the past for most people reading this! Yes, even you – the one looking down your nose at the screen, shaking your head and tut-tutting snootily. Go on, be a devil and admit it… and yes, it does count if you entered in someone else’s name!
Smid On… Improving Your Chances
Every once in a while, a “dream” comp will come along that you’d really love to win. Not necessarily because of the value of the prize, but simply because the promotion somehow manages to push all the right buttons and capture your imagination. You therefore pull out all the stops to try to improve your chances of winning, and willingly put extra time and effort into the task. I’m sure that we’ve all been there. For me, it usually happens about once a year – it’s something that can’t be contrived or helped along, it just “happens”. One memorable time for me was a Tesco Bestfoods Lapland comp one Christmas, a fairly modest prize value-wise, but everything just seemed to click. Happily I was a winner, and sure enough the prize day ranks up there as one of my best ever. Well worth the time spent, but because this was one of those rare “dream” comps, I actually enjoyed the challenge anyway. It matters not that other, more mundane tasks fell by the wayside as my enthusiasm was reawakened – comping had become FUN again. It’s a feeling that I’m sure that many of you reading this will recognise, if not then I’m certain that your time will come!
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow “bottle” this enthusiasm, and apply it to every comp we enter so that the enjoyment – and prizes – could be sustained? And wouldn’t it be great if it had an ‘on’ and ‘off’ switch. Then you could choose to ignore the unmistakable “feeling” when you felt it brewing in the presence of a near-impossible ‘instant win’ task, which you just KNOW is going to cost you a fortune in pursuit of something more elusive than even the Holy Grail. But maybe that’s just me!
Although you can never force or truly replicate the enthusiasm and overall feeling that a “dream” comp will trigger, I’ve tried to think of what it is that I do differently on the rare occasions that one does actually come along. Perhaps by applying one or more of these ‘tips’ to our general comping life, it might make our hobby run smoother. It’s unrealistic, I think, to resolve to put them all into practice against every single comp we enter, but just by being aware that “we can do it when we really want to” might help concentrate the mind. And if you still can’t muster up any real enthusiasm for a particular contest, then perhaps it’s time to ask yourself exactly why. Lack of time? Lack of motivation? A sub-conscious admission that no, you don’t really want or need a free pack of denture fixative? If the only effect of this checklist is to make you reappraise and prioritise your hobby, thinking properly about what precisely you want to gain from it and what you can realistically achieve in the time that you have available, then it will have been useful. It’s no accident that I said ‘you’ a lot in that last sentence. The most important ground rule for giving a particular competition your best shot is to make sure that it’s within your own personal “comfort zone”. In other words, the resources that are going to be needed to do it justice – the time, the expenditure, the skill – are realistically at your disposal. It’s a point that I’ve made before, but one that I feel cannot be emphasised enough simply because comping can sometimes encourage a “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality. Just because someone else seems to be able to spend 24 hours a day doing competitions, and has a bottomless pit of money to spend on expensive qualifiers and all the latest comping tools, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you can do the same. Acknowledge it, accept it, get over it, find your own level and make sure that you operate only within the realistic boundaries that you’ve set yourself. This is your “comfort zone”. A place where you don’t have to fret about spending time or money that you haven’t got, or making arrangements for a prize that you neither want nor need. A place where – having honestly weighed up your own skills – you know deep down that you have a genuine fighting chance of success if you really put your mind to it. A positive place with nothing whatsoever to worry about, nothing at all to lose and plenty to gain.
So then, we’ve established the right attitude for a particular competition. This isn’t just “Top Tip No. 1”, but is a fundamental requirement. Now let’s consider the nitty gritty; the little things that you should always be trying to do to increase your chances in a “dream” competition. And of course, they won’t do your chances any harm in the more run-of-the-mill promotions either!
Get your entry forms and qualifiers early
Chances are, you’ll want to enter a “dream” comp more times than usual. Even if you need to come up with a slogan, your genuine motivation will probably mean that you’ll come up with many more ideas and styles than you might do for a typical promotion. So it’s very important to plan in advance for this. Make sure that you have enough entry forms – remember that if the bug really bites, you could end up needing dozens rather than your more usual one or two. If the qualifier is an on-pack token, ensure that you buy plenty of the special packs before they disappear from the shelves. If you need till receipts, plan ahead and make sure that you start collecting these early, maybe even collecting more than one on each store visit. The golden rule with forms and qualifiers is that it’s better to have too many than too few. Spares can always be swapped or, more likely with “dream” comps, used to make even more entries. When I got the bug with the Lapland comp, I ended up collecting more than thirty till receipts almost accidentally. I simply bought a qualifier every time I visited a Tesco store, and obviously didn’t fully appreciate how often I darkened Tesco’s doors! But when it came to making my entries, having created a huge stack of tiebreakers using techniques that I’ll explain later, the receipts were all used. In fact, I could have used more (and did indeed have to make one extra, last minute purchase for a final, spur of the moment slogan that ultimately proved to be the winner!). So plan ahead and start piling up the forms and qualifiers as soon as you can – and never underestimate the numbers you might need if the bug REALLY bites!
Enter often – and on time
I always like to spread my entries when I enter a particular comp many times. Too many entries in one envelope could appear too professional or, indeed, desperate. And by putting all of your eggs in the one basket, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to the vagaries of today’s Post Office, or the mood of one particular member of staff on one particular day at the handling house. Entries for prize draws especially might not even be opened prior to the draw, so all of the time and effort you have put into cramming hundreds of entries into just one package will be wasted. Better, I think, to spread your entries out across the whole promotion period. With a “dream” comp I will always try to enter daily if the rules allow, beginning as early as possible and continuing as close to the closing date as I dare. This method ensures that you have a good spread of entries throughout the ‘sack’ at the handling house. It can also have advantages where a comp has several draw dates. Get in early and you beat the rush. Carry on until the bitter end, and others may have long given up. On-pack promotions will invariably disappear long before a final closing date, so entries for these comps will peak well before the end. Prepare for this by buying plenty of packs when they are available, but staggering your entries right up until the closing date.
Where possible, you should also try to cover every type of entry route if you’re given a choice. Phone, text, email and postal entries should all – we are constantly told – stand an equal chance of winning. All are logged onto the same computer, or all are painstakingly transferred onto postcards for the final draw. You can choose to believe this if you want to, and I’m sure that it sometimes does happen, but I prefer to take a more cynical approach. Cover all of the options if it’s possible, if not then I always choose the ‘headline’ route – the one that gets the most coverage in the comp blurb. You’ll often find that this costs you the most to enter, and rings up (no pun intended!) the biggest profits for the promoter, but your willingness to add to a company’s profits will do you no harm at all. Of course, there are plenty of people reading this who have won prizes via a ‘free’ route – it genuinely does happen. But in the world of the “dream” comp, where you want to be considering anything that might possibly swing the odds in your favour, you may as well push the boat out. If a promoter has gone to the trouble of setting up a premium rate phone line, the comp is headed ‘Ring To Win’ in big letters, and details of the free postal route are buried away in extremely small print away from the main comp, ask yourself why – and then give them what they want!
Don’t forget too, that you can enrol willing friends or family members to enter a “dream” comp in their name. Just make sure that you tell them first, and that everyone involved is clear on what happens to any prize. This is a good way of improving your chances in a comp where there is a restriction on the number of entries. You can also use this technique to ‘target’ an entry in a particular promotion – male or female, young or old – depending, for example, on the type of magazine in which a comp appears, or the design and wording of an entry form which might give strong clues as to the target audience.
Take a chance – try something different
We can never be sure what a judge will be looking for in a comp, so if we’re entering a particular contest lots of times then it might be prudent to try a few different styles. This can apply to tiebreakers – I’ll come onto those later – but also to draws. Decorated envelopes or cards, coloured or irregular paper and envelopes, different coloured inks, fancy handwriting or printing. Even using scents – delicate aromatherapy to make a judge feel good maybe, or perhaps something less subtle. I once impregnated an entry form with aniseed in a draw where a famous dog would supposedly be choosing the winning entry, since I was sure that I’d read somewhere about aniseed being a dog’s most favourite smell! Alas, I didn’t win. But everything’s worth a go, just remember to send a few ‘normal’ entries too in case the judges choose to deliberately ignore the ‘attention seekers’. The luxury of a “dream” comp is that you’ll probably have plenty of entries to play with, so let your imagination run riot. Cover every eventuality, and hopefully at least one of your attempts will hit the spot.
On a practical level, you should make an extra effort with your “dream” entries to ensure that they arrive at their destination safely. Give them plenty of time to arrive, and address them clearly to avoid any mis-sorts at the Post Office or handling house. Returning to my Lapland example, I was concerned that the same address was also being used for a major on-pack draw. This draw was probably attracting tens of thousands of entries, dwarfing the hundreds that ‘my’ comp was generating. If my envelope had been accidentally put into the ‘draw’ sack by an inattentive sorter, then it would probably never see the light of day again. So I used a small padded envelope, addressed with a bold marker pen, which would have stood out in a subtle way. Enough to make the person doing the sorting at the handling house snap out of their hypnotic trance anyway, pay attention and realise that my envelope needed to go somewhere other than the ‘draw’ sack where most of the other mail was headed.
Work hard on the tiebreaker
This might sound like I’m stating the obvious, but stop and think about your own tiebreaker “routine”. How do you do yours? Do you have several on the go at once? Do you try to tackle one or more in a set session? Do you have a time limit, either planned or accidental as a closing date hurtles towards you? Chances are, your ‘normal’ slogan writing is now part of your established comping pattern. It must take its turn, and possibly even fight for your time. Which is ridiculous really, considering how fundamentally important a decent slogan is when it comes to winning a prize. So when that “dream” comp comes along, the first thing you must do is forget your usual methods. Clear the decks, and focus completely on the task in hand. You shouldn’t need any motivation to do this, if this is a genuine “dream” comp then you will have more motivation and positive vibes than you know what to do with.
Of course, you can skip this bit if your “dream” comp doesn’t involve a slogan. You can follow the tips elsewhere in this article to improve your chances, but ultimately your efforts will be in the lap of the comping Gods – and Lady Luck. If the comp involves a slogan or other skill tiebreaker though, then you can really start to turn the odds in your favour.
My own technique for a “dream” tiebreaker is to commit the lead-in line to memory on day one and – whenever you have a spare moment – to think of nothing else. Where possible, try to ‘manufacture’ spare thinking time by going for a walk or having a long bath or early night. Always carry a pen and paper to write down your thoughts, however outlandish they might seem. As your thoughts develop, you’ll start to build on these early ramblings. Think of anything and everything associated with the promoter, the product and the prize. Keep a completely open mind as to the style of your tiebreakers. Nothing should be sacrosanct, and with multiple entries you will have the opportunity – and the desire – to experiment. As time passes, favourite themes will emerge – and perfecting and building on these will naturally take over in your thought processes. Play around with every possible combination of words, and every conceivable variation, the golden rule always being – if in doubt or you can’t decide whether one slogan is better than another, get yourself another qualifier and enter them both! A “dream” competition doesn’t turn up very often, after all.
As your confidence grows, the ideas and themes will start to flood in. The process will start to take on a life of its own, as you create more and more slogans. Recurring themes can be emphasised; provisional slogans can be mixed and matched. Early slogans that seemed unbeatable will fall by the wayside as improvements, enhancements and whole new ideas come thick and fast.
Creating slogans in this almost leisurely way will be a completely new experience for most people. I’m sure that we’ve all read those comping advice books that tell us how we “should” be doing it, but in the real world our good intentions often fall by the wayside (if indeed they ever get off the ground in the first place!). Time, financial and other pressures often conspire to make our tiebreakers rushed, last minute affairs. A “dream” comp, though, is different. The positive feelings that you have for the promotion, when added to the time that you somehow magically free up, make for an irresistible combination. The length of time that you positively set aside for the project is ultimately your greatest weapon even though other, less important tasks may have to fall by the wayside. But this is no more than ‘natural selection’, survival of the fittest. And let’s face it – you would never have given the forgotten comps your fullest attention anyway since, as the “dream” comp has proved, you’d have really rather been doing something else!
Of course, a “dream” competition is a rare beast. For which, in many ways, we should be thankful – we’d simply not have time to do anything else otherwise! But when one does come along, it’s amazing how the project immediately becomes a pleasure and a priority, naturally assuming first place in the order of things. I’ve given some indication in this article of how my own mind works when faced with a “dream” promotion. I hope that some of you find the ideas useful, others will have your own techniques that work just as well for you. Although “dream” mode as an entity can never be forced or fabricated – it will inevitably just “happen” and even you will sometimes be at a loss to understand how or why – it will always bring out the best comper in you. So even though all of the effort and ideas explained in this article can only fully come together very occasionally, why not try to incorporate the odd idea into your general day to day comping? This will hopefully make you feel a little happier and more positive until the next “dream” comp comes along.
Smid On… Comping History
I was browsing through a couple of books recently – one a comping advice book from the late seventies, the other featuring product packaging from the fifties and sixties – and both books, in their own way, served to illustrate how comping trends change. The labels and boxes on display featured plenty of comps, almost always with a skill task and with barely a free draw – and certainly not a single instant-win – in sight. The number and value of prizes on offer back then was on a different planet to anything available nowadays, with houses, enormous sums of money (even by today’s standards), dozens of cars and hundreds of luxury family holidays (and I do mean luxury!) up for grabs in single competitions. There seemed to be much more imagination on the part of promoters too, with plenty of more unusual prizes available. One Gillette comp offered fifty places on a treasure hunt on Brighton beach, where they’d buried all manner of prizes – including actual cars – and what you dug up in the course of the day, you kept. What we’d give for something out of the ordinary like that these days!
The old comping book too gave an insight into how things have moved on. Advice on improving your winning chances focussed on the most popular tasks of the day - things like order-of-merit and estimation tasks, and how best to grapple with identifying a building or animal from the photograph provided. There was even an entire section on how to find your way around a typical reference library! Hard to remember that this book was only written thirty-odd years ago. Of course slogan comps existed back then too, but even these were somehow ‘different’. One example of a judging session gives us an insight into how the NINETY THOUSAND entries were sifted. And the clever wordplays and grammatical advice intended to spruce up 70s efforts would surely fall on stony ground today. Would most people reading this know (or, frankly, care) about the need for a verb in the subordinate clause of a slogan to make it grammatically correct? Or, more importantly, would a typical judge these days? Declining standards of judging was a hot topic even back then, and while the book went to great lengths to help readers figure out such mysteries as the difference in completing a ‘slogan’ as opposed to a ‘sentence’ depending on what was specifically asked for, or the correct form of completion if a particular style was requested – a limerick or a couplet, for example – the advice did come with a health warning that ‘judges today’ might not apply the rules of a comp quite so literally. So some things never change then!
Although a comper of old would have been able to look for clues in the small print of a promotion, and would in most cases have been able to rely on the instructions and rules being strictly adhered to (sometimes even hiding a deliberate catch or two!), this sadly is something that tends not to be echoed today. Lazy and slapdash copywriting or printing sometimes leaves us in doubt over such fundamentals as the entry address or closing date, let alone anything more cunning. And can we depend on judges being properly briefed anyway? The result of a limerick competition a couple of years ago springs to mind. Only around half of the winners were ‘true’ limericks so was this, I bemoaned loudly at the time, the fault of entrants (to such an extent that insufficient ‘proper’ entries were received), or the lax judges? The response to my mutterings shocked me. Four out of the six work colleagues within earshot at the time – all a very intelligent bunch, with plenty of qualifications including a law degree between them – didn’t have a clue about what form a genuine limerick should take! So, in the face of this ‘dumbing down’ – certainly of general knowledge these days – I think that we must take the view that contest judges are not going to be exempt. And that the days of an ‘s’ appearing at the end of a word in the small print fundamentally altering a competition task as part of some sublime trick question are long gone.
The judging of a major competition often used to be a big event, with journalists and possibly even stars of the day being drafted in as independent judges. Because of the number of entries involved, chances were that entries had gone through several sifts at the handling house before a manageable number of ‘best’ entries were presented to the final judging panel. Although there is probably neither the mechanism, budget or indeed the need for such a complex process these days, it’s always best to ensure that your slogan works on many different levels… just in case! It should appeal, and be relevant and comprehensible, to a 20 year old admin assistant who might be doing an initial sift at the handling house, as well as a company director who might be on the main judging panel. A good slogan needs to make an immediate impact – again work on the assumption that the first time someone glances fleetingly at your effort might be the ONLY time, and so you need to grab their attention quickly. Avoid obscure wordplay, or celebrities or events that appeal to only a small section of society – remember, would an 18 year old hairdresser understand what you’re saying as well as a 40 year old manager or a 70 year old retired soldier? Would a telly-addict Sun reader AND radio-loving Times reader get the joke? Judging is usually cloaked in mystery. We can never know how our entries are going to be judged, or by whom, so try your best to cover every eventuality.
Another useful indication as to whether your slogan cuts the mustard is the ‘read-aloud test’. Chances are, if your entry makes it to the very last hurdle then it will be read out loud by the judges so that the entire panel can discuss its merits. So always make sure that your entries flow nicely, scan well, and don’t rely on too many written puns which the reader may have to flag up to fellow judges. Although, looking again at that last point, you might think that if judges want or need to spend extra time on your entry for whatever reason, then this could give you some kind of advantage. The choice is yours!
My advice above is much the same as that being dispensed in the late Seventies, so although fashions and trends come and go in comping, some things never change. Slogans will (hopefully!) always need to be constructed, and judging standards will always leave much to be desired (or so we think anyway). Some of us might pine for that ‘golden era’ when tasks were more complicated and fulfilling, and prizes seemed largely to be more varied and valuable, but today’s scene has its advantages. Only being up against a few hundred rivals in a typical slogan comp for example, rather than tens of thousands. What goes around comes around though, and no doubt the popularity and style of competitions will continue to evolve, with old formats being occasionally dusted down and revisited. But a comp is a comp, and I’m sure that we’ll all adapt as necessary!
As an amusing aside, the book that I was reading gives an example of a slogan that originally appeared in America, and until the book was published in 1979 had won just one prize in a UK contest, way back in 1971. So it wasn’t included as an example of a chestnut but was, thought the author, an excellent example of two separate winning techniques – rhyme and balance – coming together in a potent mix. The slogan in question was “experts perfect them, connoisseurs select them”! And the rest, as they say, is history. At least we know that plagiarism existed in the ‘golden era’ too, and that even compers back then were not ashamed to borrow a nice sounding line!
Smid On… Comping Madness!
Once upon a time, way back in 2004, a new type of competition appeared - the NutriGrain ‘24Seven’ on-pack promotion. It was one of the first ‘inkjet’ draws, where a unique code appeared on a pack that needed to be texted in to enter a series of draws. Little did we know at the time that, all these years later, such inkjet promotions would become so ubiquitous on the UK comping scene – but at the time this new concept had compers in a frenzy. Some of my comments back then, at the ‘birth’ of inkjetting, remain relevant today – so let’s take a trip down Memory Lane!
NutriGrain 24Seven. Hourly draws for 42 days, over a thousand £500 cash prizes, almost instant notification and payout to winners, and a prize haul of around £150,000 for Chatterboxers alone. And were we all happy? Amazingly not. In fact, this competition turned into a little adventure that clearly encapsulated and demonstrated many of the things I’ve been saying in my articles since they began. A sort of ‘practical test’ if you will, to show both the good and bad sides of comping and compers.
Let’s concentrate on the positive aspects first. This was a very well-run promotion, with lots of prizes. Cash prizes in fact, our favourite! There were clearly a few problems getting promotional packs into shops at the very start, but again for the keen comper this should have been a positive benefit. A bit of extra work tracking down packs in the early days will have given you a better chance of being successful.
But on the negative side, Kellogg’s had clearly planned the promotion to push all of the right buttons in a comper’s head. This, for many people, led down the path of mass multiple entries and sleepless nights as the supposedly off-peak early hours would surely give a better chance of success. The lure of an almost instant prize notification, coupled with ever increasing winners lists on Chatterbox and elsewhere turned compers into, effectively, gamblers. The thrill of the chase stopped being fun for non-winners as they began to chase their losses – a task made easier by the sudden arrival of a plentiful supply of promotional packs halfway through the game. And, as regular readers of this column will appreciate, once this starts to happen then the problems – and the recriminations – begin.
So, what points previously covered in these articles have been well and truly hammered home by NutriGrain? Well, the main one must be to honestly appraise whether a comp is really for you. Does it fall into your “comfort zone” in terms of both the time and money that needs to be invested? Just because a comp is there, that it looks good, and that other people are successful, doesn’t make it compulsory for you to jump on the bandwagon. I appreciate that it can sometimes be difficult to look away, but you should always try your best and wait for a competition more suited to your own situation to come along.
And once you’ve decided whether to join in, it’s important to find a sensible level of participation. With something like NutriGrain, where multiple entries by the bucketload were positively encouraged, it can be so easy to lose track. Decide on a realistic budget, and stick to it. Ignore the fact that other people might be able to afford more entries than you – that’s comping, I’m afraid. And never, ever try to keep up with the comping Joneses. Trust me, this is something that you’ll never manage to do. There will always be a comper who – for whatever reason – you think is better off than you. Accept it, ignore it, and concentrate instead on your own strengths.
Be consistent – both in your own strategy AND views. With NutriGrain, there were around a thousand £500 prizes. If this had been a straightforward draw, how many entries would you have made? The format of this comp cunningly persuaded most of us to throw our usual common-sense approach out of the window, and before we knew it we were buying dozens, hundreds, even thousands of qualifiers. And all for, effectively, a £500 prize. Doubtless many of us are now reviewing the comp in the cold light of day nibbling on a stale NutriGrain bar (yuck!) and wondering what on earth happened. There’s a moral there somewhere!
As for being consistent in your views, by this I mean that just because somebody can afford to pay for enough NutriGrain bars to enter the comp 1,000 times (or whatever), then this is not wrong or unfair. If a person is lucky enough to win more than once then, as long as the rules allow it, good luck to them. If that person wasn’t you this time, try not to dwell on it and instead find a comp that does play to your own strengths and that you can enter lots of times (a freepost draw, for example, or a free web comp). As I’ve said plenty of times before, comping will never be a level playing field. And, even though you must bite the bullet sometimes, this is something that you must accept. The advantage will be yours one day, honest!
Plan for a comp, and put in as much effort as you can. Never forget the old comping adage: it’s funny, but the harder I work at comping, the luckier I seem to be. If you want to try to improve your chances in a particular comp then you do sometimes have to put in a bit of extra effort. In the case of NutriGrain, this will have meant sourcing promotional packs very early on, from more than one store or even town if necessary, having a few sleepless nights to take advantage of off-peak hours, buying as many packs as your budget allowed etc. But remember that your own definition of "hard work and extra effort" might be completely different to someone else's, and so you’ll still not be guaranteed success.
It’s a shame, and – I suppose – an indication of some of the people who ‘enjoy’ our hobby, that despite running an innovative promotion with a huge number of cash prizes, Kellogg’s will probably receive more brickbats than bouquets. And this, of course, will encourage them to run future comps not one jot. It always amazes me how quick some compers are to bite the hand that feeds them. Understandable and perfectly acceptable, of course, when a promoter is being deliberately obstructive or underhand, but absolutely not – in my opinion – because you’re in a jealous strop over not being chosen as a winner. That’s just sour grapes, and conveniently overlooks the fact that comping is all just one big game of swings and roundabouts, where you’ll inevitably be the beneficiary one day. And come the glorious day that your solitary prize draw entry or last minute, chestnut slogan that you didn’t post until the day after the closing date anyway wins a prize, it goes without saying that your whingeing and complaining will – as if by magic – fall silent.
The big question with NutriGrain must be –
will Kellogg’s ever do it again?
Cue plaintive wailing and theatrical mopping of brows from most of us but go on, admit it, in a strange way we’re all missing it already! Personally, I think that the format of the comp – coupled with the fact that another promotion requiring mass purchases has just appeared on Pop Tarts, a similar Kellogg’s product – shows that the promoter was looking for a short, sharp increase in sales. We can only speculate on the reason – perhaps that corner of the cereal aisle that is forever ‘Kellogg’s morning products’ is under threat because of floundering sales, or a new product from a competitor – but it’s clear that they had little interest in building long-term customer loyalty with this one. They just wanted to shift units – and LOTS of them, in the shortest possible period of time. Comping history shows us that this kind of strategy is rarely sustainable beyond the occasional one-off promotion. Look at the ‘cokeauction’ comps a couple of years back, where consumers were positively encouraged to buy Coke by the case load and where you needed to have made a purchase of hundreds – if not thousands – of Coke products to win anything worthwhile. This was a sensible idea by Coke at the time, coming as it did soon after some health and contamination scares in other countries, and with the news that Pepsi was poised to take over the ‘number one cola’ spot for the first time ever, but the long term benefits were less spectacular. Customer loyalty especially was tested, as Coke’s genuine consumers found themselves blown out of the water by people willing and able to bulk-buy the product. And despite a much-trumpeted agreement between Coke and the auction website concerned to run many more similar contests over a five-year period, ‘cokeauction2’ was as far as it got before the plug was pulled just a few months later.
For a promotion to be truly successful, it needs to do more than just increase a product’s sales. It must somehow sustain that increase, improve awareness of the product generally and, most importantly, engender a loyalty for the brand. OK, us compers are admittedly a bunch of unashamed fly-by-nights who remain loyal to a product only until a competition’s closing date, so I think that promoters will always struggle with that last aspect more than they ever fully appreciate! But this, especially, is what was missing from the NutriGrain adventure and it’s this, I think – coupled with the fact that people now have enough NutriGrain bars in their homes to last a lifetime (so there could actually be a massive DIP in sales over the coming weeks and months) that will make Kellogg’s think twice before they do it again. Only they know whether the promotion met all of their particular objectives, whatever they may have been, so who knows?
Smid On… Premium Rate Entries
This article was originally written in 2004, when a new genre of competition – the TV quiz channel – came and went almost in the blink of an eye. It’s a good example of how comping trends evolve, and may well stand you in good stead when comping’s “next big thing” comes along!
Premium rate telephone comps have come a long way over the last few years, and no publication or television programme seems complete without some kind of intelligence–insulting question nowadays. Thankfully, most promoters no longer inflict the nation’s s-l-o-w-e-s-t speaker upon us, or painstakingly repeat information that is already provided on the page in front of us, or treat us to an entire Beethoven symphony before getting down to the nitty gritty. But then again, with the huge range of tariffs now available, this is no longer necessary. A promoter can collect between 10p and £1.50 a minute these days, or even a flat rate connection fee of up to £1.50 without the actual call itself having to last any time at all, so even though the calls themselves might seem quicker and slicker compared to a few years ago, chances are they’re costing you more than ever.
Never forget though, that this type of comp is nothing more than a money-making exercise for the promoter – although, of course, the more ‘reputable’ promoters will tell us that the service they offer is very different to the rest. Whilst others may run their phone lines purely for profit they, it goes without saying, only do so as a convenience to their valued readers or viewers. But of course they do! Strange they’ve never heard of Freephone numbers then, isn’t it, given how much they obviously care for and value their customers?!
Recently, we’ve seen the arrival of satellite and cable TV channels that take the idea of phone-in comps a step further. Not for them the occasional programme with a comp tacked on the end, the entire output of the new channels is simply question after question, with viewers being invited to phone in with their answers.
The best organised, most competently presented channel at the moment seems to be the most reputable as well, although the slick and glossy appearance probably makes it the most dangerous cost-wise too. At a flat rate 60p per call, with the format encouraging quick, multiple calls, your phone bill can soon mount up. The other channels are even more expensive – usually at £1 a call – but their presentation tends to be more ponderous with fewer callers making it through to the studio, so it’s less likely that you’ll get caught up in the thrill of the chase. I’ve called most of these channels at least once in the interests of research, and I have to say that care is needed should anyone reading this consider them to be their passport to riches beyond their wildest dreams. One channel told me live on air that my answer was wrong, but when they revealed the answer later it was exactly what I’d said. Another rang me back to “log” my answer into their “computer” – only an old cynic like me would assume that this was so they could pick and choose exactly when a winning caller would appear on air. Another actually asks you to leave your answer when you first ring, so again they can pick and choose callers (a theory amply demonstrated when three quarters of what was quite obviously Robbie Williams’ face was on screen for over two hours as caller after caller kept giving the wrong answer!). The most transparent selection system sees lucky callers getting straight through to the studio immediately on calling, but again, with today’s technology, how do we know for certain? Regular callers could be deliberately chosen, callers who consistently get answers wrong… who knows?
The format of the channels leaves much to be desired too. Questions are either ridiculously easy, so that it’s simply a matter of being lucky enough to be chosen to go on air, but in this case a caller is invariably not taken for a very long time in order to notch up the broadcaster’s profits. Or, the questions are very difficult (some might say impossible) and they run for most of the night, with caller after caller giving the wrong answer and then being encouraged to call again. When the channels first started, the ‘difficult’ questions were along the lines of “how many triangles are hidden in this extremely complicated pattern” so at least had a definite right answer, but now the viewers have no such luxury. Some recent laughably-impossible tasks have included being shown the back of a hand-written postcard and having to add up all of the numbers on it (including things like very bad handwriting, smudged postmark, even the small print on the postcard itself – all of which was crammed in a tiny box taking up around a quarter of your TV screen). Or how about having to add up all of the money shown on screen – again in a very small area – and, only on closer examination, discovering that the £20 note was in fact a £28 note, that a 5p piece actually said 3p, and that letters and pictures had been missed off many of the other notes and coins to render them invalid? One regular puzzle at the moment asks you to select which flags or road signs on screen are completely correct – again, with one of the dimensions perhaps being just millimetres out, or a colour being just slightly the wrong shade, this is almost impossible to work out accurately on a typical TV set. It’s a shame really, since the original difficult puzzles were at least a challenge, but now they’re increasingly being replaced with subjective, ambiguous tasks. With, and I’m being my usual cynical self again here, the potential for the channel to select an answer that suits them.
Even the prize structure can be open to abuse. Most of the channels advertise a high potential prize, but in reality the ‘guaranteed’ element is very low, with the rest only being paid out if you win a ‘jackpot’ game. On many of the channels, this is simply an on-screen graphic where you must choose one or more numbers to find a prize. Now, I’m no TV technical expert, but surely the director can put whatever he or she likes behind those numbers at the flick of a switch?
As technology improves, and legislation changes to allow more and more kinds of comping (or should that be gambling) tasks, it’s more important than ever that we keep our wits about us. Promoters are getting more cunning, and as new initiatives get rolled out, it doesn’t take long for competition organisers to regroup in the light of experience and begin to tweak things in their favour over the ensuing weeks and months. More than ever, especially with something new, if something seems too good to be true then it invariably is. So always proceed with caution, especially if you’ve never heard of the company involved. Just because someone can afford to take out an ad in a newspaper or magazine, produce a glossy mailshot or fancy website, or even broadcast a TV channel for a couple of hours in the dead of night, it doesn’t automatically follow that they’re completely honest. As with any comp, don’t get carried away and always trust your instincts.
Smid On… Order of Merit Competitions
In this article, we look at a genre of comp that seems to be making a bit of a comeback lately – the Order Of Merit (or OOM as it’s sometimes known in comping parlance). This task was very popular in the past, but fell out of favour as fashions changed. Now it appears to be making a return, albeit in a slightly different format that seems to favour promoters (but of course!), but the general underlying skills and techniques needed to tackle an OOM successfully remain the same.
Those of us who have been comping for a long time will doubtless recall many books and articles written on the subject in the past, packed full of permutations and matrix strategies. I don’t intend going into such detail here, as frankly the number of OOM tasks today – whilst on the increase – is still nowhere near the levels enjoyed (or endured!) in the 60s and 70s. So a typical 21st century comper only needs to be armed with a general overview rather than an in-depth analysis of the subject.
Historically, OOM tasks were a diverse bunch. The number of items to put into order varied between 3 and 20. Those items might have been statements, photographs – you name it! – with prizes going to those most-correct entries. But today’s typical OOM is much more predictable, usually a list of 10 statements with prizes only being paid out to entrants who get the task 100% correct. Sadly, because of the odds involved, this often means that no prizes are awarded at all – hence the OOM of today being saddled with a somewhat dubious reputation. True, sometimes the odds are ridiculously high, or the statements that you need to rank might be ludicrously indistinct, and in these cases you must simply make a judgement call and choose whether to ignore the promotion. There are plenty more fish in the sea, after all!
So how then do you work out the odds in an OOM? Put simply, you just look at the number of statements that you need to consider at every stage of the task, and multiply them together. So if, for example, you need to rank 10 statements in order, then your calculation would be 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1. In other words, when you’re deciding on your top ranking statement from the 10, you have all 10 statements to choose from. By the time you consider your second best, you only have 9 statements remaining to select from. Then 8, then 7 – and so on. By following this calculation through, we find that the odds of correctly ranking a 6-statement OOM are 1 in 720. With an 8-statement task, the odds increase substantially to 1 in 40,320. With 10 statements to rank, your chances diminish to a meagre 1 in 3,628,800. And with 12 statements, an improbable 1 in 479,001,600. Small wonder then that the OOM is coming back into favour with certain promoters!
And don’t be fooled either by those easier-sounding tasks that tell us that we ‘only’ need to rank – say – 10 out of 12 statements correctly. The method of calculating the odds remains essentially the same, the only difference being that you limit the number of numbers to be multiplied together to the number of statements being ranked. So, in our ’10 out of 12’ example, the calculation would be 12 x 11 x 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 (i.e. 10 numbers), but if your task was to rank the top 8 from 12 then the calculation would be 12 x 11 x 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 (i.e. 8 numbers). Which gives us odds of 1 in 239,500,800 and 19,958,400 respectively. Still an almost impossible task, despite being cleverly worded to sound a much simpler challenge. If prizes are being awarded to ‘most correct’ entries in these cases, then obviously the comp would still be worth a go since someone must win and you’re in with as good a chance as anyone else. But given the current trend of prizes only being awarded to totally correct entries, I think that you must ask yourself some serious questions before undertaking the task. By all means give it a try if the qualifier is inexpensive or something that you use anyway. Otherwise, my advice would be to forget it and concentrate instead on another comp that is much more likely to reap rewards.
So then, you’ve worked out and taken stock of the odds and have decided that you want to give a particular OOM comp a go. When you’re faced with a list of OOM statements to put into order, your first important task is to carefully read the rules and instructions so that you are clear on exactly what it is you’re being asked to do. Barring the occasional slapdash copywriting, most comps should clearly state (or, at worst, give a few hints) as to whose shoes you should be putting yourself into for your OOM challenge. And it’s important that you do this. It’s no use going with your own personal opinion if, for example, you’re a retired man and the entry form asks you to put statements in order of importance to a busy young mum! Priorities will obviously be markedly different, but you’d be surprised at the number of competition entrants who make this most basic mistake. So make a conscious effort to digest the exact task that’s being asked of you. If the guidance is not as clear or obvious as you’d perhaps like, then consider other aspects that might point you in the right direction. An OOM task in a particular newspaper or magazine, for example, would probably use their typical reader as the common denominator. A particular supermarket, their typical customer. So if information is lacking in the competition blurb, simply try to do a little research or lateral thinking to transform yourself into the person that you think the comp is primarily aimed at; the person that the promoters are expecting you to be.
Once we’ve kept our side of the bargain of course, we then have to hope that the judges don’t let us down. But we can only trust that they have been properly briefed and are as diligent as we’ve been in interpreting the task. An OOM is always going to be subjective, and just because a judging panel doesn’t agree with your own answer it doesn’t necessarily mean that the judges got it wrong. In any event, OOM comps should always be judged by a panel rather than just one individual, so arguably the resulting consensus view should be a faultless meeting of minds. Indeed, this can be a useful exercise to try yourself if you’re attempting a particularly difficult OOM; just ask your friends and family to tackle the list independently. It’s surprising when you do this how recurring themes often emerge, and you can use the data that you collect to arrive at an ‘average’ result – always worth sending in as an entry in its own right.
So then, you’ve carefully considered the task in hand and have decided on the approach that you are going to take to put the items in order. Next, you must dissect each statement on the list in turn and consider it through the eyes of the OOM subject (which, remember, almost certainly isn’t going to be you!). This bit must really be down to your own instincts, but it probably goes without saying that something along the lines of “low, low prices” would be immaterial to a Harrods shopper, but paramount to an Asda devotee. “In depth gossip and soaps coverage” may be attractive to a Sun reader, “political and world affairs coverage” to a Times reader. “Cheap, quick and easy” would be important to a busy mum, but not at all to a dinner party hostess keen to make an impression. So you need to get into the mindset of your subject, and then consider every word or phrase. It’s this kind of exercise that will help you separate seemingly identical sentiments such as – for example – “low prices” and “great value”. The “price” factor will always come first in the eyes of discount retailers such as Aldi, Netto and the like. They offer overall “great value” obviously, but this is always ‘price-led’ in industry parlance and so, by default, the “price” element will always come first. At the other end of the scale, the more upmarket retailers – Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s et al – see themselves these days as offering a whole new shopping experience involving choice, quality, and other benefits on top of just competitive prices. So they’d probably put “great value” – where ‘value’ incorporates many more factors other than simply price – at the top of their list.
Another important thing to remember is to tell the promoter what you think they want to hear. They may have delusions of grandeur in your eyes, but it’s their competition so always give them what they want. If a particularly grotty shop boasts of an “unrivalled shopping experience” in their advertising, and then run an OOM comp featuring exactly the same statement, then it’s obvious that this will feature highly in the final shake-up – even if you think it’s rubbish. A “favourite” product doesn’t necessarily mean the “best” product. “The finest I’ve ever tasted!” in the context of a 50p microwaveable pizza would probably never realistically stand up against a gourmet restaurant equivalent. But it’s a safe bet that the more truthful and technically accurate “Looks and tastes like cardboard” is never going to feature in an OOM comp! Be careful not to massage a promoter’s ego too much though – a product whose main selling point is that it’s cheap and cheerful probably would genuinely see statements such as “reassuringly expensive” and “top quality, the best there is” as definite negatives, off-message and inconsistent with the brand. So it’s always worth studying the packaging and advertising material before embarking on an OOM challenge, just to give yourself a better idea of how the promoter sees himself, and where a product has been positioned in the grand scheme of things.
Even after you’ve moulded the statements on offer into some kind of order, the format of today’s typical OOM probably means that you’re still up against some serious odds before you will win a prize. Nothing less than an exactly-correct order tends to do these days and, as mentioned above, this usually means beating astronomical odds. One way of getting these odds down to something slightly more favourable is by using a system of “bankers”. A “banker” is a statement that you are reasonably certain will occupy a particular position on the final list, usually first or last. You then ensure that every entry you make has your “bankers” in the same place, and you then only have to concern yourself with the remaining points. Using bankers can really improve the odds in your favour. If, for example, you’re reasonably confident of the statements that will occupy first and last place in an 8-item OOM, then you have effectively turned the challenge into a 6-item OOM instead. With odds of just 720-1 rather than 40,320-1! Of course, your bankers might turn out to be wrong – but at least you were able to approach the task in a more methodical way and, with a bit of practice under your belt, you might have more success next time.
An ‘optimum’ target for many OOM enthusiasts is to try to reduce the challenge to a 4-item task. At this point, assuming all of your bankers are correct of course, your odds of getting a correct order have become a more realistic and achievable 24-1. In other words, there are 24 different ways of putting four items in order. All of which means that, providing the qualifier is reasonably cheap and multiple entries are allowed, you can make 24 entries – with a different permutation each time – to guarantee that one of your lines will be correct. I must emphasise again at this point that there is no certainty your bankers will be correct. Obviously, if they’re not, then every entry that you make will be wrong. But if they are, then it makes your task infinitely easier. A risk well worth taking!
Another useful odds-reduction tactic that you can use either alongside “bankers”, or instead of them if none of the statements jumps out at you as being a ‘dead cert’, is to group statements together and perm them within their groups rather than across the whole OOM. For example, if in a 10-item OOM you think there are 4 strong points, 3 average ones, and 3 weak ones, then you ensure that the top 4 places on your EF are always taken up by the strongest 4 points (in varying orders), the next 3 by your three average points, and the bottom 3 places by your weakest statements. Once again, there are no absolute guarantees with this system. You’re effectively keeping the three sub-groups completely separate so if, for example, one of the statements in your bottom three is actually ranked fourth from bottom by the judges, then this will make every single one of your entries incorrect. But the benefits of getting it right are clear to see. I believe that using some kind of “banker” or permutation system to improve your odds is always better than creating random, haphazard lines. Of course you must be strong and have absolute faith in your bankers, and clearly you won’t be right every time. But by reducing the odds down to a genuinely attainable level, the few occasions that you do get it right will almost certainly bring you success. Whereas an illogical hit-and-miss approach, up against such huge odds every single time, carries no such guarantee.
The Order Of Merit is not for everyone. In the good old days they were always worth a go, because someone had to win. This tends, sadly, not to be the case today. But it’s still true that you’ve little to lose and potentially plenty to gain from an OOM. So, providing you fully understand the odds that you’re up against, and you don’t have to spend too much on a qualifier, pitting your wits against an OOM judge can still be something of a challenge. Using some of the tricks of the trade touched on here, you can start to shift the odds in your favour, so why not have a go. Believe it or not, people do win!
Smid On… Those Kit Kash-style Auction Comps
This article was originally published in 2005
New Kit Kat promotional packs should be widely available by the time you read this, and with £5,000,000 worth of prizes up for grabs it looks like the competition could be – well – interesting to say the least! The comp will be based on an ‘auction’ format, a genre that reared its head briefly a couple of years ago with Coca Cola and Cadburys Crème Egg promotions, but which promptly sank without trace amid much acrimony and gnashing of teeth among ‘real’ compers. Surprising then that the concept has returned with such a reputable company as Nestle at the helm. Hopefully they’ve learnt lessons from the previous promotions, but given the laughably inept manner in which Kellogg’s ran another recent auction on their Pop Tarts, I probably wouldn’t bet on it.
The first major auction-style promotion in the UK was ‘cokeauction’. The basis of the competition was simple – you just collected as many Coke ringpulls as you possibly could and used them to bid for prizes on a special website. This type of comp, Coke announced, was the way ahead. They struck a long-term deal with one of the major internet auction sites to run auctions for years and years to come. But the wheels soon came off the idea. An extremely inferior ‘cokeauction2’ appeared shortly after their first big effort, and then… absolutely nothing. Those of us who played along soon realised that ‘normal’ Coke customers would never stand a chance of winning any of the big prizes. People were bidding thousands of ringpulls for single prizes – still making a good profit, mind you (I’ll come onto that later) – but a typical ‘one can a day’ drinker would quickly feel alienated. Newspapers and television soon jumped on the “Coke are encouraging people to be unhealthy” bandwagon, and it quickly became apparent that the type of consumer being attracted to the promotion were way off-target from the kind that Coke (somewhat naively in hindsight) were probably expecting.
A little while later, Cadbury’s joined the fray with their Crème Egg auction. The principle was the same (if slightly stickier!) – the more egg foils you sent in, the more you could bid for prizes. No surprise then that exactly the same thing happened to Cadbury’s as had happened to Coke, and the Crème Egg version didn’t even make it to a sequel.
Hence my surprise that Kit Kat seems to be gearing up to go down exactly the same path now, one possibly fraught with even more dangers this time around. The debate on unhealthy eating is raging more loudly than ever. And with this latest promotion you don’t even have to physically send in your Kit Kat wrappers – you just enter codes from the packs onto the website. But when the Australian and Canadian versions of cokeauction used this format, both were hacked and descended into chaos. Could the same thing happen here? Do Kit Kat appreciate exactly what’s going to happen? Do they frankly care? This kind of promotion is not renowned for encouraging long term loyalty, but is a perfect tool for when a temporary, short-term fillip is needed in sales figures. And as to whether this turns into one of Nestle’s greatest triumphs ever, or one of their biggest disasters, only time will tell.
I’ll slot in a brief disclaimer at this point that, owing to deadlines, I’m writing this article before the Kit Kat auction goes ‘live’. So I don’t know the exact form that the promotion will take. Hence, the advice that follows is fairly general. And if it doesn’t fit the Kit Kat promotion exactly, then you can at least hopefully put it to some use in similar competitions in the future.
Your first stepping stone to success then is fairly obvious. Buy lots of the product. And I do mean LOTS. Be under no illusion here. If you want to be in with a chance of scooping the major prizes in this type of comp, then you’re going to have to make an extra special effort to obtain promotional packs. One or two additional purchases on each shopping trip are never going to be enough. The bigger promotions usually offer plenty of smaller prizes to keep everyone interested, so you should get at least something if you manage to collect a modest stack of wrappers. But Kit Kat is promising us cars, kitchens, holidays and more – and the simple truth is that a few dozen wrappers is never going to be enough for these big prizes. The fact that Kit Kats are so widely available, and are easy to carry and store, means – I think – that some of the bidding could go through the roof. It took a special effort to source, collect and store a thousand Coke cans for cokeauction, and it was a very messy and time-consuming task carefully unwrapping Crème Eggs. On top of which, with those promotions you had to endure the extra effort of counting up and mailing in your qualifiers. There are no such obstacles this time – hence me thinking that this one could be BIG!
Of course, the need to buy hundreds or even thousands of Kit Kats will inevitably lead to cries of “not fair” from compers without the time, inclination or resources to do such a thing. But, as I’ve often said in these pages, it’s not compulsory to enter a particular competition. The fast, instant auction format, much like the recent NutriGrain comp, can suck you in and get you caught up in the thrill of the chase if you’re not careful. So, take a deep breath and be strong enough to walk away if this kind of promotion isn’t for you. There are plenty more comps out there! But the fact is, if you are willing and able to participate in an auction comp in earnest, then unless you’re particularly unlucky and provided you keep your wits about you, you should always turn in a profit. £1,000 worth of Kit Kats might sound greedy and over-the-top, but if you were going to spend thousands on a new car, kitchen or holiday anyway then the outlay starts to sound comparatively modest. Who’s the maddest? Someone who spends £10,000 on a new car? Or someone who goes out and buys 5,000 Kit Kat bars to win the same car? You do the maths!
The next important strategy is to get your timing right. Make a concerted effort to have plenty of credits ready to go right at the start of the promotion. I have many fond memories of major prizes going for just 30 or 40 ringpulls in the early days of the first cokeauction. And the Crème Egg auction got off to such a slow start that some of their initial prizes went for the equivalent of just one tenth of one wrapper! Time really is of the essence. Although Kit Kat seems to be giving us a longer than usual lead-in time before bidding starts, meaning that more people will be better prepared, bids will still be noticeably lower on the earlier prizes compared to later on.
Also, try to avoid falling into the common trap of thinking that later auctions will be less popular. Experience has shown that people do not get fed up of a promotion, or run out of credits by the end. On the contrary, an awful lot of canny players will pace themselves and deliberately hold credits back until the closing stages. The last couple of days of cokeauction saw prizes going for ten times more credits than usual, as people desperately tried to spend their credits. Of course, Kit Kat could be different. The promotion has a much longer closing date than usual (30 September), so if promotional packs disappear a long time beforehand, and if players are tempted with a constant stream of valuable prizes right up until the end, then there might be a shortage of credits still in play at the climax. Another factor could be whether Kit Kat hold back one big prize right until the very end. A car, say, in the very last auction. If you hold back all of your credits but are subsequently outbid, then you’ll end up with nothing but a pile of worthless Kit Kat wrappers. Could it happen? It never has done yet in a UK promotion – they’ve always been designed to give you at least a couple more chances to spend your credits if you fail on the final biggie – but overseas versions HAVE presented players with this ultimate ‘Grand Finale’ dilemma in the past. So who knows? We’ll obviously have to wait to see how the latest promotion pans out, but generally – as the recent NutriGrain comp also demonstrated – I would never advise you to deliberately hold on to credits until the bitter end. Because an awful lot of people usually have exactly the same idea.
Staying with the timing of bids, most of these auction promotions – much like any ‘real’ auction on ebay, for example – will be at their busiest in the last few minutes before the closing time. So always ensure that you are on line then. Don’t show your hand too early on, otherwise you’ll give your competitors too much time to respond. If there are variable closing times of auctions throughout the day and night, try to target prizes that close at off-peak times – or auctions where more than one lot is closing at the same time. Loyalties will be divided in these cases, so your competition might be less. But always try to avoid becoming involved in more than one auction yourself at a time. It’s physically possible of course, by opening multiple windows on your computer, but mentally it’s a nightmare – especially if you’ve got your heart set on a particular prize. Best to sacrifice the rest and concentrate on just the one lot. In most of these promotions, the same prizes tend to come up more than once anyway so chances are you’ll be able to bid again at a later date.
How then do you ‘pitch’ your bid? If you try to be clever and outbid the current leader by just 1 or 2 wrappers each time, you’ll inevitably end up disappointed. My advice is to decide on your maximum spend, and place that bid as near to the closing time as you dare – preferably with just seconds to spare so that others can’t respond. Make sure that if an auction clock is provided, your own timepiece is exactly synchronised to ‘Kit Kat Time’ since every second really does count. The previous course of an auction is rarely any indication of how the bidding will eventually end up after the usual bidding frenzy in the final couple of minutes, so never be fooled into thinking that you might get a prize for less than you were originally prepared to pay. Likewise, don’t get caught up in the madness and end up bidding over the odds for a prize. Decide on your top bid, and stick to it. If you’re really desperate to win a particular prize and bid all the credits you have, but are still beaten by someone else, then you’ll obviously be disappointed but you know that you tried your best. If you lose out by trying to be clever and by playing cat and mouse, and you eventually get beaten by a bid that was actually well within your reach, then you’ll be absolutely gutted and will be kicking yourself into infinity. Trust me on this one – I’ve been there! If you’ve invested, say, £500 worth of Kit Kats to win a prize worth £5,000 – then don’t lose sight of the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, an extra £50 ‘stake’ is comparative small fry. Don’t risk throwing everything away for the sake of one or two 30p credits. When you’re up there with the big prizes, it simply isn’t worth it.
It’s always easier to pitch your bid when more than one prize is up for grabs in an auction. If there are twenty DVDs say, then it’s slightly less fraught to slot your bid in at third or fourth place with a minute to go and then just sit back. But you still mustn’t rest on your laurels. Those last few seconds of an auction can still produce plenty of surprises. In one Coke auction I went from first place to outside the top thirty in less than ten seconds. So be warned, and constantly hit that ‘Refresh’ button to keep a close eye on what’s happening in the dying seconds.
Easier said than done I know, when you’re caught up in the thrill of the chase. But never get carried away, and only ever target items that you actually want or need. And always check the Terms and Conditions of particular auctions. Because they were targeting the student and teenage market for example, Coke had lots of prizes only open to particular age groups, or students in full time education etc. It was all very annoying when they were winning amazing prizes with ridiculously low bids that I could easily have beaten but hey, that’s life. The Kit Kat auction is the first that is only open to over 18s, and which is offering more mainstream prizes rather than the ‘yoof’-oriented high tech gadgets and white knuckle experiences so favoured by promoters previously, so it’ll be interesting to see how things eventually pan out this time around.
My final piece of advice is to not register your codes too early. Have plenty of wrappers ready to go of course, but see how the promotion unfolds first. There may be restrictions on certain prizes, for example, which might make it prudent for you and your family to open more than one account later on – you don’t necessarily want to be stuck with just one account loaded with thousands of non-transferable credits if so! Cadbury’s were hit with so much criticism with their Crème Egg auction that they started to change the rules mid way through and began to restrict certain prizes to ‘first time winners’. Kit Kat may do the same, and their method of crediting accounts gives us compers much more control and flexibility than before. Take advantage of this, and pace yourself just in case.
It’s clear that these auction promotions aren’t for everyone. Personally I love them. Most of the hi-tech gadgets in my home – widescreen TV, DVD player, music system – are there courtesy of Coke, and my major wins from Crème Eggs included a holiday to Hong Kong and a round-the-world trip. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who thought I was mad, buying up swimming pools full of coke and Crème Eggs by the hundred. Indeed, I thought I was mad myself sometimes! But I like to think that I had the last laugh when the value of my wins is compared to the outlay. I can’t promise that Kit Kat will take us back to those halcyon days, but if you heed the advice above and – most importantly – have FUN, the weeks ahead should prove fruitful for many of us. Enjoy!
Smid On… Entry Forms
One question that I’m regularly asked is “How and where can I find entry forms?” Even more so recently, as many of the supermarkets that used to prove fertile hunting grounds seem to have moved away from having competitions as part of their promotional armoury.
The answer that I always give is to either subscribe to a reliable entry form supplier or, if you prefer to hunt for forms yourself, visit as many stores as you can as often as you can. Check every shelf carefully – with practice, you’ll soon develop an ‘eye’ for a potential EF from a mile away! – and, if you know from posters in-store, or from information in Compers News or elsewhere that a particular form should be on display, don’t be afraid to ask for it. The harder a form is to find, the lower the entry is likely to be, so don’t be shy. If a particular store is good at putting forms on display, make sure that you give positive feedback to encourage them to carry on. And if a branch is consistently dire, make your feelings known to the manager or head office. In some cases, it might even be worth getting in touch with the promoter of the competition. Supermarkets don’t run comps out of the kindness of their hearts after all, chances are they’re charging a manufacturer a lot of money to run a competition on their behalf, so if a store isn’t keeping its end of the bargain, a promoter will want to hear about it.
You should cast your net as widely as possible in any EF quest. Don’t stop at your nearest Tesco store, for example. Another branch just a couple of extra miles away may be better at displaying forms, or may be on a different rota for running particular types of promotion or hosting demonstration stands on different days. The biggest superstore in your locality may not be as good at displaying forms as, say, the smallest branch in a less desirable part of town. The manager in the small store might be on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, just starting out with plenty to prove and so keen to impress. Whereas the massive store might be overseen by an area manager who’s hardly ever on site and who has more important things to worry about than a ‘silly’ leaflet. So shop around, and get a feel for the stores that you visit. How are they laid out? Where do EFs tend to be put? At the entrance? With the product? At the end of aisles? And always, if in doubt, never be afraid to ask. Not only might you uncover a rare gem of an EF as a result, but you’re making it known that there ARE people out there who are interested in the competitions that a store runs. And the more interested a store thinks people are, the more comps they’re likely to run in the future.
Always try to get hold of a form as soon as you know it’s out there. Leaflets might only be on display for a certain amount of time, irrespective of the closing date, and in the case of forms handed out at demonstration stands in stores or at exhibitions, might only be in your locality for a day or two at a time. Even forms that do have a longer shelf life might quickly disappear – the form might carry something of interest to a non-comper, a free sample or money-off coupon for example. So snap up the forms as soon as possible, and always make sure that you pick up enough to cover potential multiple entries, mistakes, and even swaps with fellow compers who might be looking for just that form!
If you do prefer to put your faith in an entry form supplier, try to choose one that limits the number of customers. As we all know from personal experience, it can be difficult enough at times to sustain even our own needs. Imagine how hard it would be keeping a few dozen customers happy – now how about a couple of hundred!?! Even the best EF suppliers will have difficulty finding the rarer forms for all of their clients though, so even if you do sign up it’s advisable to go out yourself occasionally to see what you can find.
And if you’re a Compers News subscriber, don’t forget to log on to Chatterbox for a thriving ‘swaps’ forum if you’re still struggling to find a particular form.
Trends come and go in comping. In the 60s and 70s for example, most comps appeared on product packaging rather than on separate forms – and we seem to be seeing a mini return to this at the moment. In most cases, these special packs tend to be more widely available than specific forms, although the down side of this must be that they attract more entries as a result. But there are still some rules to follow when it comes to tracking down special promotional packs. First and foremost, buy them when you see them. They’ll not be around forever. If you need 6 tokens to enter, get all six tokens as quickly as you can – there and then if possible. If your local store, at first glance, doesn’t appear to have any special packs on display, be sure to check the shelves thoroughly. Older or newer stock might be buried away at the back. As distribution methods get more efficient, it’s much easier nowadays for manufacturers to target particular stockists or areas with a special pack, so if your search remains fruitless try to find out more information from Compers News or Chatterbox. Do you need to look in a particular store, for example, or might packs only be available in a specific region? As with entry forms, the more obscure a pack is to find, the better your chances in the comp are likely to be. So it’s always worth making that extra special effort.
Smid On… The Spirit of Comping
I’ve noticed an innocuous little clause that has started to pop up in a few Terms and Conditions recently, always something along the lines of “entries that are not within the spirit of the promotion will be disqualified”. Now, what on earth is THAT supposed to mean?
It all sounds rather too subjective for my liking, call me paranoid but it could even mean the end of ‘professional’ comping as we know it. After all, might not marketing ‘experts’ decree that the true ‘spirit’ of a particular competition would be for a bored housewife to knock out a quick slapdash entry in a spare moment – thus condemning anyone who actually makes a concerted effort to win as contravening that ‘spirit’? Heaven forbid there are some of us who might actually target a competition with modest multiple entries, a single-item till receipt, a decorated envelope, or a slogan that took more than thirty seconds to think up! I can perhaps understand the reasoning behind including such a clause in a competition’s rules, but surely a better solution would be to address specific concerns with individual points in the T&Cs themselves, rather than with a sweeping (and, some might say, lazy) statement that is open to much (mis) interpretation.
When, then, might someone go against a competition’s ‘spirit’? Whenever they annoy the promoter for any reason would seem a rather churlish answer, but in the absence of any further clues, I’m afraid that it’s the only advice I can give. Quite what you will have to do to get the promoter hopping mad with rage is another matter, but again we can only guess. Blatant cheating would, obviously, go against the ‘spirit’ of a competition – but by cheating, you’re already deliberately contravening one or more of the rules anyway so should be disqualified for just that reason, ‘spirit’ or not. So we probably have to search deeper. Multiple entries being allowed, but your 25,000 attempts going against the ‘spirit’, maybe? A postcard requested, but your giant florescent version that takes two people to hand-deliver pushes things too far? Or, less extreme but perhaps more sinister, might a quality entry from somebody who regularly appears on winners lists go against the ‘spirit’ of a ‘fun’ promotion aimed at a company’s ‘real’ customers? I’ll be keeping a close watch over the next few months to see whether this clause becomes more commonplace and, if so, will be interested to find out the reasons for its sudden appearance. My suspicion is that it’s just another of those cover-all clauses designed to cover a promoter’s back – along the lines of “we can amend the rules of this competition at any time”. But wouldn’t it be better if promoters put more effort into making a competition’s rules completely watertight and unambiguous in the first place?
Whilst the definition of ‘spirit’ might need some thought, it does hammer home the fact that almost everyone has a different opinion on what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour for a comper. Using family and friends addresses, decorating entries, peeling off stickers in stores, recycling winning slogans, deliberately making entries dog-eared and coffee-stained for that amateurish look, even ‘doing a smid’ on instant wins. Perfectly acceptable to some people, outright cheating to others. I’m sure that everyone reading this has their own opinion, and lines that they will never cross, and of course it’s galling when others are successful with tactics that fall firmly inside your own ‘no go’ zone. Personally, I get irritated when people blatantly try to sway a judge with decorated entries, or put them in an impossible situation with slogans that shamelessly gain capital from ill or disabled family members. And people who brazenly steal tokens, barcodes etc. by simply ripping them from products in store – a totally different scenario from taking a loose neck collar or easy-peel sticker that doesn’t damage the actual product. And… well, I’m sure you get the picture! One man’s meat is another man’s poison in this wonderful comping world of ours, and most of us are content to ‘agree to disagree’ on many aspects. But to suddenly have a promoter start judging whether your own comping tactics are in the ‘spirit’ of the hobby or not… humph, what do they know?!
One competition where it would have been interesting if ‘spirit’ had been mentioned in the rules was 2005’s infamous ‘Kit Ka$h’ promotion. OK, so I warned at the time that you’d need to buy thousands of Kit Kats to stand any real chance of the bigger prizes. But even I didn’t quite appreciate exactly how many thousands! As the promotion wore on, it became clear that just a couple of big players were cleaning up almost all of the worthwhile prizes having purchased hundreds of thousands of bars – taking advantage of wholesale prices, and having retail outlets where they could easily dispose of the resulting – codeless – chocolate to an unsuspecting public. And if that wasn’t bad enough, tales soon emerged of multiple accounts, computer software being used for things like automatic bids on items, and even the Kit Ka$h website itself being tweaked by those in the know to gain an advantage. Nestle tried to stay one step ahead – not particularly successfully, it must be said – by changing the T&Cs as the promotion went along (which the original rules allowed them to do), but a ‘spirit’ clause would have made their job a lot easier. The ‘spirit’ of Kit Ka$h was – Nestle kept telling us – for typical consumers to have some fun, on a level playing field, with a few Kit Kat wrappers. For someone to dominate the promotion with hundreds of thousands of wholesale wrappers, while at the same time indulging in various computer shenanigans, clearly goes against that ‘spirit’. End of story. But of course, there could still be problems. Where do you draw the line? Would buying as many as 100 bars be against the ‘spirit’? 1,000? 10,000? Who knows? Which all takes me back to the point I made earlier – surely a straightforward declaration in the rules as to what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t would be easier? It might mean promoters having to put a bit more effort into setting their competitions – no more obvious ‘cut and paste’ T&Cs that have clearly been lifted with no thought, and even less proof-reading, from an earlier contest – but surely this is better than uncertainty and doubt.
Personally, I viewed the entire Kit Ka$h adventure with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I said at the start that Nestle had clearly not done their homework since, in my opinion, they would never have gone ahead with such a promotion otherwise. The wreckage of earlier attempts by others was there for all to see. And nothing that happened as the promotion panned out has made me alter my view – although Nestle executives might be rubbing their hands with glee as I write this, of course. Who knows?! There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst us compers as we’ve seen ‘our’ prizes snatched away by ‘outsiders’, but the most important strategy for compers in a promotion like this – to get in and out early, before those ‘outsiders’ cotton on – once again held true. We probably had one or two weeks before the rot well and truly set in, which was more than enough time for some of us to do rather well. But for anyone left with burnt fingers as prices soared and as more and more people piled in, the whole episode should still act as a useful lesson. That the early bird invariably catches the worm, that you should only spend time and money that you can afford on a promotion, and that spending hundreds, even thousands of pounds on a promotion is no guarantee of success. Also, that us ‘serious’ compers have no divine right to prizes in a competition. Multiple Kit Ka$h computer accounts is arguably no different to us using friends and relatives addresses on an entry form to circumvent restrictions on entry numbers. Or using computer know-how to exploit weaknesses in a system – no different to ‘smidding’ an instant win. Or a few technical tweaks to make your entry somehow ‘better noticed’ by Nestle’s own computer – nothing more than the hi-tech equivalent of a decorated postcard. It would be rather boorish of me, after all I’ve said in past articles about the importance of playing to strengths, to attack someone who’s a computer expert with the resources to easily obtain and dispose of hundreds of thousands of Kit Kats, for embracing this promotion so heartily. Especially since Nestle obviously let him! It does appear to be a match made in heaven for the lucky chap after all, and I don’t doubt that if one of “us” had been so fortunate, then bouquets would have replaced the brickbats. I don’t condone blatant cheating of course, be it by a comper or not, but again it all comes down to where individuals draw the line. As long as we keep within the rules… and the ‘spirit’ of the thing, of course! Although how on earth we’re meant to pre-empt and interpret the required ‘spirit’ of a promotion is an entirely different matter.
Smid On… Being an Organised Comper
One question regularly asked by newcomers to comping, and indeed by old hands when they occasionally find themselves overwhelmed by comps in a particularly busy month, is ‘how do you manage to keep track of everything?’
Well, like so many aspects of our hobby, it’s entirely up to you. The important thing though, and I’ve said this many, many times in these articles, is that the method you use is one that you personally are completely comfortable with. It’s no good deciding on a complicated system of filing and cross-referencing for example, if you’re the world’s most disorganised person. You probably don’t need telling that a filing cabinet with folders for every day of the year, coupled with a daily diary and computer spreadsheet, will give you optimum control. Or that a comprehensive coding system whereby you can tell at a glance which entry of the many you made won a particular prize, what colour envelope you used, the time and date it was posted, and what you had for lunch that day, might be desirable. Indeed it might, but time for a reality check here.
If you struggle to find enough hours in the day for comps already, is a time-consuming state-of-the-art filing system really going to help you? Obviously, some kind of order is going to be an improvement on the precarious piles of paperwork that are currently dotted around your home, but it needs to be tailor made to fit in with your own circumstances. Is it worth, for example, setting up a system that tells you which pillar box you used for a given comp, and what picture was on your postcard, if you’re never likely to call on that information, or use it in the future?
Record-keeping is one of those areas in comping where we’re forever being urged to ‘do the right thing’, or where every so often we’ll read of someone’s own all-singing-all-dancing system that makes our own modest method seem pathetic in comparison. And when the class swot proudly trumpets one day that not only did they win a really nice baseball cap using a postcard with a red flower on it, written in orange crayon, posted second class on a foggy Friday morning some 71.5 hours before the closing date, it’s tempting to swoon in awe and vow to start logging your own entries in the same methodical manner with immediate effect. But wait! That same ‘bells and whistles’ system will emphasise with the same unerring accuracy exactly how unsuccessful a particular entry has been, and how depressing is that going to be? And for every prize won in a thoroughly organised manner, trust me, there’ll be many won by ad hoc, last minute, long forgotten entries where the sender barely had time to write the winning postcard, let alone accompanying card-file notes, painstakingly cross-referenced by prize, promoter and handling house.
If you’re an extremely well organised person, with the time and inclination to do it properly, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a complex filing system. I know that some compers wholeheartedly enjoy this aspect of the hobby, and good luck to them. But for the rest of us, a much simpler system should suffice. A simple wallet for each month, perhaps. A ring binder or box file for your slogan work. And perhaps another folder for all of those miscellaneous bits and bobs – the odd EF you’ve kept where you’re quietly confident so want to retain the T&Cs, receipts etc. that may be called for if you win a prize, notes of Order-of-Merits to compare against the official results. But even this needs to have the ‘personal touch’ – don’t risk things getting out of control and disorganised by keeping too much. Do you really need a copy of every EF going back years, for example? Go through your folders regularly to keep them up-to-date, and ONLY keep the things that YOU think will be important. And not what some so-called ‘expert’ tells you should be.
A couple of people have asked me what system I myself use. Well, I’m happy to tell you, but in a totally non-prescriptive manner. If it gives you some ideas for a system of your own then that’s great, but the chances of my own method working for someone else without at least some personalisation and embellishment are minimal. I don’t pretend that it’s a perfect system either, it’s designed to make sure that I don’t miss a closing date and that’s about it. For me, much of the fun in comping lies in the postman turning up with an unexpected prize from a long-forgotten competition. Personally I can think of nothing more soul-destroying than crossing out prizes as notification dates pass, so I deliberately don’t keep records of competitions entered and the like. It’s all about informality and surprise for me, it may be something completely different for you of course, so again we come back to the overriding message here. That some sort of order will most likely help you in your hobby, but the system must be designed to suit YOU.
So then to my own admittedly informal system… prepare to be underwhelmed, and no sniggering at the back! It works for me 99% of the time though, and that’s good enough. I could, of course, strive for a foolproof 100%-accurate arrangement, but the extra time, effort and paperwork needed for the sake of that extra 1% would be completely out of proportion. So I’m happy to take the risk.
My own comping ‘office’ consists of just four items. One of those little drawer sets that you can buy from any stationer, indeed most hardware stores during the current ‘decluttering’ fad (mine’s A4 size with three drawers), two box files, and an A4 plastic wallet. The drawers are labelled as follows: comps where qualifiers are still needed, tiebreaker comps next month on, and non-tiebreaker comps next month on. All self-explanatory I think! One of the box files houses my tiebreaker efforts – in no particular order I have to say, as I enjoy a good rummage and it’s amazing how often I stumble across an idea from a completely unrelated comp that can be adapted to suit the promotion that I’m working on. The other box file is used to keep miscellaneous ‘archive’ comping stuff just in case it’s needed for reference purposes. And the plastic wallet is used for the current month’s comps – deliberately designed to be portable so that I can tackle the contents in a spare five minutes at home or work more easily than if they were entwined in some grander filing scheme.
At the start of every month, I go through each drawer to ensure that comps closing during the new month are put into approximate date order and moved to the ‘current’ folder, and both box files to make sure that paperwork no longer needed or relevant is thrown away. This monthly exercise also serves as useful double check and memory-jogger. Some people may see this as a duplication of effort, which a more targeted or finely honed system would prevent, but I’ve developed this particular system over the years to suit me. The relative informality of the system mirrors my approach to the hobby generally, so needless to say it’s not going to suit everyone. But I’m sure that you get the idea! Admittedly not a computer program, spreadsheet, card file or Post-it note in sight – but if these are the kind of things that you yourself are more comfortable working with, then go for it. I’ll say it again (for the last time, promise!) – YOUR filing system needs to work for YOU. It has to be something that YOU are comfortable with, that can evolve to suit YOU, and that YOU can realistically operate effectively and efficiently.
So while I hope that some of the suggestions and ideas here have been helpful, there is no use in me suggesting rigid rules, or of detailing a definitive ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way.
Over to you then – and good luck!
Smid On… Reading the Rules!
Although often long winded, and inevitably the most boring part of any entry form, the Rules of a competition are extremely important. So you should always read them.
Now, it might seem that I’m stating the obvious for many of you reading this. But it appears that this fundamental requirement is in danger of becoming something of a forgotten art for an increasing number of compers. Indeed, for some, it’s an art that might never have been learned in the first place. In this age of ‘plain English’, ‘bullet points’ and ‘headline messages’, it can be easy to dismiss the small print as being unimportant since, if it was important, it’d be written bigger. And it takes far too much precious time to read anyway. Right? Well, no. Indeed, make that a resounding NO.
I really cannot over-emphasise the importance of the small print in any competition, and a couple of moments spent reading it at the outset will inevitably save misunderstandings and disappointments later. And equally important, once you’ve read it, is that you make sure you do exactly what it says. Sometimes rules are poorly written, inconsistent, or even downright pointless. But irrespective of what you think about them, you should always try your best to stick to them.
I can think of several past examples where the small print has been open to interpretation and where we compers thought that the promoter had made a mistake. But not a bit of it! Whether a mistake had been made of course, but the promoters then decided to do the decent thing by still adhering to the published rules despite the fact that they should have said something different, is immaterial. In these cases, if you hadn’t stuck rigidly to the rules as published then you wouldn’t have won a prize. Simple.
A Dixons DAB Radio comp asked for a slogan ‘in twenty words’. And yes, as all of the winning slogans proved, they DID mean EXACTLY twenty words. Other comps have asked for slogans in ‘more than 15 words’. It’s very easy to misread this, or assume it’s a mistake given the more usual ‘less than’ instruction, but again – as the winners list proved – ‘more than 15 words’ was indeed correct.
And it’s not just with tiebreakers that we need to be on our guard. Every element of the comp must be closely checked. Are capital letters necessary, or a particular colour of ink? Are there any restrictions on entries? Do till receipts need to be highlighted in a particular way, or qualifiers attached to entry forms in a specific manner? Is that missing letter in a wordsearch really a misprint, or a deliberate trap? Is plain paper asked for? Or a stamped envelope?
Of course, sometimes we’re faced with a major inconsistency or other error in the rules that makes it impossible to totally comply. Two different addresses for entries perhaps, or conflicting closing dates. In such cases, you could always try to seek clarification from the promoter (a quick telephone call or e-mail to their Customer Care Department usually does the trick) or even, if possible, make multiple entries to cover every eventuality. In the case of conflicting closing dates, common sense dictates that you should aim for the earliest date just to be on the safe side – although industry guidelines stipulate that consumers must never be disadvantaged by obvious errors in Terms and Conditions, so in theory the later date should always prevail. But better to be safe than sorry.
Sometimes rules might seem particularly finicky, but that doesn’t matter. If a rule is there, then we must always adhere to it. Capital letters make it easier for judges to read your entry, for example. Black ink aids the scanning and copying of entry forms. A till receipt might need to be securely attached to an entry form if the judging process involves original entry forms being manhandled around several departments, and being passed around different judges, at a handling house. So always assume, when you’re faced with a particularly pedantic clause, that there’s a method to the madness. And even if you can’t think what it could possibly be, just grin and bear it and give the promoter what they want. You can’t be disqualified for sticking rigidly to the rules after all – however bizarre they may seem!
Of course, we all like to think that promoters and handling houses are on ‘our side’ and that, to increase goodwill and interest in a competition, they’ll happily accept everything bar the most blatant rule-breakers. We’ve all heard stories about late entries winning prizes, and illegal multiple entries or entries without qualifiers coming up trumps. I don’t doubt that such things happen, but in this day and age it frankly isn’t worth taking the risk. When I was researching this article, I came across the trade website of one of the UK’s biggest handling houses, which was full of case studies of promotions they had run in the past. I had entered most of them! But rather than glowing testimonials of superb customer service and happy punters, the site instead boasted of such things as the ‘barriers’ that had been deliberately built into promotions to keep successful entry numbers (and, thus, promoters’ costs) down. Or the number of steps between purchase and entry being specially designed to ensure “a natural fallout of redemptions” (their dodgy English, not mine!) without a contest appearing too difficult to enter. Whilst we could perhaps debate some of the ethics at work here, legally the company concerned is doing nothing wrong. But it does amply prove my point that there ARE clearly promoters and handling houses out there who offer no margin of error whatsoever when it comes to interpreting rules. On the contrary, they look to the rules as a deliberate means of thinning entries out. So don’t play into their hands. And always make sure that you read the small print.
Different handling houses and promoters will set the rules for their promotions in different ways and for different reasons. Most, I’m sure, don’t deliberately set out to confuse or trap us into making invalid entries. The use of lined paper instead of plain, or the lack of capital letters, or blue ink instead of black, will probably be tolerated by many promoters providing your entry can still be processed without too much difficulty. But notice that word ‘probably’. Is it really worth taking the risk, when the adjustments needed to stay within the rules will probably take you just a couple of seconds? And bear in mind that there are promoters and handling houses out there who DO deliberately throw in extra hurdles to keep the number of valid entries down. You’ve probably seen the type of clauses I’m thinking of; the need to include SAEs of particular sizes and stamped with a particular – uncommon – value, having to write your details on a small piece of paper of a certain size, elaborate qualifier requirements including receipts dated within a certain period, tokens AND other parts of the packaging. These handling houses are typically those that are, in industry parlance, “Fixed Fee”. In other words, most handling houses will send a bill to a promoter after a competition has been run, which might vary depending on the number of entries that were received, the number of prizes paid out, and the amount of work that had to be put in to fulfil the promotion. Fixed fee companies however, charge a promoter a set amount at the very start. This might suit the promoter as their budget is set in stone at the outset, but from that moment on it’s in the handling house’s interest to keep the number of entries – and hence their costs – to a minimum. These organisations WILL probably deliberately build extra hurdles into the application process, and reject entries for the silliest of reasons, so why take the risk?
Smid On… Getting the Best from Royal Mail
Unfortunately the Royal Mail is not as efficient as it once was, and it is clear that we’ll never return to the good old days when you could send a postcard from the office mid afternoon to warn your other half that you’d be late home for tea that evening. Still, that’s progress I suppose. So, as deliveries get later, final collections get earlier, and pillar boxes get fewer, now seems a good time to flag up some hints and tips on getting the best out of the Post Office – especially when you have a last minute entry that really MUST arrive at its destination the next day.
The first piece of advice though, in this day and age, must be to NEVER leave an entry until the last minute. The Royal Mail these days simply can’t be trusted to deliver on time (or even at all, some might argue), and even if they do pull out all the stops and get your letter to its destination on time we can never know how many people and departments there are to be negotiated at the other end. It’s no use if, while a judging panel is mulling over entries in a penthouse boardroom somewhere, your own precious attempt is still being processed in the basement. So always try to give yourself plenty of time.
If this isn’t possible, then you must pull out all the stops to ensure that your entry speeds through the postal system as quickly as it can. Here are a few basic do’s and don’ts.
DO use a standard sized envelope whenever speed is of the essence. This will make it more likely that your entry can be machine sorted, which will hurry it through the system. You don’t seem to see the old ‘Post Office Preferred’ logo nowadays that used to appear on stationery, but my advice is to always use C6 (i.e. half A5 size), C5 (half A4), or DL (standard sized long envelopes) when you’re in a hurry. And stick with standard postcards. Machines can cope with these, so keep your homemade efforts and strange shapes and sizes for something less urgent.
DON’T use brightly coloured envelopes, or ink. These can sometimes ‘blind’ the sorting machines, and you’ll lose precious time if your item needs to be sorted by hand.
DO use a ‘proper’ first class stamp. These are encoded with a wide band (tilt a stamp to the light and you’ll see it – it’s much thinner on second class stamps, and doesn’t appear at all on most other values), which the machine reads and automatically sorts as first class. Adding odd stamps to a second class stamp to make up the value, or even using two second class stamps, will not replicate that first class ‘band’, so don’t take the risk.
DO, if possible, type the address on an urgent letter. Again, this will improve the chances of the machine being able to automatically read and sort it. If you can’t do this, write neatly and put at least the Post Town in block capitals. Always ensure that the postcode is written separately, and that it makes up the very last line of the address.
DO always follow the Post Office’s own advice on addressing your letters. Don’t use commas, full stops or any other punctuation (it can fool the machine), and do not centre or stagger your lines. Provided a post town and postcode are used, it is no longer necessary to include a county name.
DO try to ensure that there is at least a 2cm space between the last line of an address (i.e. the postcode) and the bottom edge of your envelope. The first thing that the machine looks for is the postcode, so help it to do this by writing it in the correct place, in the correct format, all on its own. On the other side of the coin, to reduce the risk of postcards being delivered straight back to you as a result of your own postcode being ‘found’ first, try to ‘hide’ it by writing other things on the same line or underneath. Or try to adapt the format (e.g. by running all of the characters together) to disguise it. Many seasoned compers also write their own details at a right angle to the stamp and destination address to further lessen any element of doubt.
DON’T underline a postcode. Remember that there should be nothing at all underneath a postcode, and that includes lines. Even this could be enough to throw the machine off the scent, so avoid it on urgent letters. Try to use unlined postcards too when you’re in a hurry, for the same reason.
DO send a postcard by first class mail. It’s an urban myth that postcards “only” go second class, left over I think from a bygone age when there used to be a cheaper postcard rate.
DON’T risk ‘Freepost’ with urgent mail. Although there’s a possibility that pre-printed cards and envelopes (the ones with a narrow barcode running along the top or bottom of the address) could go first class – it all depends on what the company concerned has paid for, and the information in these cases is hidden in the barcode – most will go second class. And ALL Freepost mail with a hand-written address goes second class. Again, ignore the myths that Freepost goes even slower than second class – it certainly shouldn’t do, and my information here is taken from the official Post Office Guide.
DON’T just stick a first class stamp on a Freepost envelope, scribble out the ‘Freepost’ bit, and hope for the best. This can sometimes work, especially on older style Freepost addresses, but most Freepost addresses today, and especially their postcodes, are unique. Some high-volume addresses might even have a postcode designed to direct the mail to a bigger sorting office in a completely different area, that’s better able to cope with the influx. So you could confuse things no-end! It’s worth a try in an absolute emergency, but there’s no guarantee of success. Better I think, if you’re really desperate, to attempt to find out a ‘real’ postal address from the Promoter or the Post Office’s Customer Services and to try that.
DON’T bank on there being a Saturday delivery to a P O Box number. Most of these are only serviced Monday to Friday, perhaps even less if promoters choose to collect mail from a Box number themselves.
DON’T think that by sending something urgent by Recorded Delivery, it’ll go faster. It won’t. In fact, the need for a signature might even slow things down. The service that you need for guaranteed next day delivery (although bear in mind that even this isn’t infallible) is Special Delivery. But again, remember that the need for a signature might actually delay things – especially if your letter is going to an anonymous P O Box number. If in doubt, try to check first.
DO try to post as early in the day as possible, at the busiest pillar-box – one at a Post Office if you can. Although only ‘final’ collection times are now advertised, most busy boxes have collections throughout the day and the quicker your own envelope gets into the system, the better.
Of course, I’m not saying that you should go through this process with every letter that you post. But it will certainly improve your chances of an urgent item getting to its destination on time. To reiterate though, the best way to ensure that you don’t get caught out is to always POST EARLY!
Smid On… Knowing Your Competition
This article was first published in 2005.
I was recently asked what the best single piece of advice would be for someone just starting out in our hobby. This, to be honest, is one of those questions that will probably receive a different reply from me every time you ask it, depending on my mood and what’s going on in the wonderful world of comping at a particular moment.
Of course, there are some obvious nuggets that will always be important. You can’t win a competition if you don’t enter it. Always respect a closing date. Read the rules. Double check to ensure that your entries are correct and complete. Make sure that postmen and judges alike can read your writing. And always try to make the effort to find rare or unusual comps where entry numbers will be lower.
But my current ‘top tip’ is never underestimate your fellow compers. The recent Walkers iPod frenzy was the event that sent this racing to the top spot and, particularly for a new comper, it’s an aspect that can sometimes be overlooked. It should, however, be a major factor in any comping strategy – and its importance must never be dismissed.
The Walkers promotion was the first for a long time that seemed to really capture the imagination of the general public. Non-compers in my office took great delight in telling me that they were joining in. Snatches of conversation overheard in supermarket crisp aisles made it obvious that extra crisps were being purchased simply to win an iPod. Walkers cleverly maximised interest with blanket advertising, and structured the competition in such a way to give people the thrill of the chase in thousands of quick, five-minute draws. With so many prizes to be won, countless iPods seemed to be in easy reach and success seemed assured.
But of course, people forgot – or simply didn’t realise – that Walkers sell millions of bags of crisps every day, and that this particular promotion appeared on well over 150 MILLION packs. Which suddenly makes the few thousand iPods on offer look very distant indeed. But why let the facts get in the way of a ‘guaranteed’ prize? Plenty of people were drawn to the comp, and seemed genuinely disappointed when their only reward was an ubiquitous ‘Sorry’ message. How could this be, when an extra multipack had been purchased to cement what should have already been a sure-fire win? Or when the player stayed up for ten minutes after their usual bedtime to take advantage of a more ‘off-peak’ slot?
And we must not forget those entrants who made no special efforts whatsoever but who, by the law of averages, would still strike lucky occasionally and throw an almighty spanner in the works for the rest of us. The busiest time of the day for entries was invariably lunchtime – presumably when Joe Public was most likely to have a bag of crisps in his hand, entering there and then with no thought or concern that thousands of people would most likely be doing the same. OK, so us hardened compers would doubtless snigger at such amateurish antics as we carefully collated our codes for a 4am blitz – only to find that entry numbers were still in the hundreds even at that hour. And those ‘sorry’ messages are even more soul destroying in the middle of the night, trust me! Oh, how I yearn for those brilliant Walkers skill comps of the seventies and eighties, the cunning treasure hunts and quizzes, having to pore over dusty volumes in the local reference library and actually learning something as I went. Which might all sound like I’m going misty eyed and dreaming of the good old days again, but which in fact brings me back to today’s top tip quite nicely.
Back in my formative comping years, I genuinely had no idea that ‘professional’ compers existed. Or that there were dedicated magazines and clubs (but no chatrooms or websites back then as the internet hadn’t been invented!). I honestly believed that if I managed to get 8 out of 10 questions in a quiz correct, then I’d be in with a chance since very few others would probably have made the effort. If I purchased one or two extra bars of chocolate to enter a comp more than once, then I’d be unbeatable. And my slogans, back then at the ‘they taste delicious and are great value’ stage (some might say that they haven’t improved much!) were of the finest quality. I never imagined that while I was having to spend hours in the local library finding, without fail, never quite all of the answers I needed, others simply spent thirty seconds scanning a solution magazine for the full set. Or that, back then, there was a magazine widely available at the newsagents that listed winning slogans and other comping news. Or that there were actually people out there who did nothing but competitions, all day every day, who would deliberately buy dozens, even hundreds, of products just to enter the competitions on them.
Of course, I know now! And in this information age, the penny probably drops a lot quicker for new compers these days compared to back then. But it IS something that you must always be conscious of. If you remain realistic about your chances, then you won’t be quite so disappointed when the prizes fail to roll in. Which in turn means you stay a little more optimistic than you perhaps otherwise might, and you’ll keep on trying long after others have given up. How many Sorrys from Walkers did it take for the average man in the street to get disheartened, do you think? Whereas if we approach a competition realistically, calculate the probable odds and – thus – our likely success, we’ll have a clearer picture of the task in hand. And as those not so well prepared fall by the wayside, then our own chances improve.
Those of us who joined in NutriGrain, or KitKash, know that the current breed of ‘inkjet code’ promotions are not for the faint-hearted. You must speculate to accumulate, and never underestimate the wiles of your fellow compers. This kind of competition looks like it’s here to stay, with another KitKash promotion promised at the end of the year, and major comps on Cadbury’s chocolate and two different Kellogg’s cereals as I write this. Walker’s parent company Pepsi are running exactly the same type of comp in the USA at the moment on one of their drinks brands (to win a games console every ten minutes), so with a truly global company at the helm such promotions could even become an international phenomenon. It’s a fair bet that these large manufacturers are not investing in the necessary machinery and software just for one-off promotions, so I think that we’ll start to see more and more of them appearing. Which may have some of the more traditional compers gasping for air, but is something that we’ll all have to learn to live with. But if you remain realistic – in what you need to do to have a fighting chance of success, in what your chances of winning genuinely are, and in how tenacious many of your fellow compers are likely to be – then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t succeed.
To return to the message in several of my past articles, it’s important that you don’t misinterpret this as some sort of ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ clarion call. For clearly if you have neither the time, inclination, or money to spend on keeping up with the comping Joneses, then trying to do so will be a recipe for disaster. You just need to be aware of what’s likely to happen and, armed with that knowledge and expectation, best decide how to approach a comp. You might even conclude that a particular promotion is not for you, and that your time would be better spent on a comp where you may have a more realistic chance. Big KitKash winners bought tens of thousands of bars. Some Walkers players had access to canteens and cafes where empty bags were discarded by the hundred. Tales abound of entire comping families texting all night, every night in shifts, and spending hours every day downloading thousands of free ‘no purchase necessary’ codes from the website. At the other end of the scale, many a shameless comper can be found unearthing bags and wrappers from litter bins, and rooting around in gutters. Nothing wrong with any of this, of course. Just be aware that it happens, and never underestimate the lengths that some compers are prepared to go in pursuit of a prize – however pointless and minor that prize can sometimes seem to be.
Smid On… Timing Your Entries
This article was first published in 2005.
There have been several recent examples that have demonstrated how crucial it can sometimes be to ‘get in quick’ with a competition. And even when the speed of entry is not an issue in itself, it can sometimes still be in a comper’s interest to act fast to obtain the necessary forms and qualifiers – especially when special packs or seasonal products are needed. So in this article, I’ll be trying to hammer home the fact that speed really IS of the essence when it comes to comping.
Taking a ‘normal’ competition first then, one with a single closing date a long time in the future, why should you act fast when deadline day is several months away? Well, entry forms won’t be around forever, so always make an effort to find them as soon as you know that they’re out there. The same goes for any qualifiers that you need to enter the comp. Buy them as soon as you can. Special promotional packs tend to sell out quickly, usually well before the closing date that can often be a long time away. Seasonal goods, be they a particularly decadent item that a store might only stock at, say, Christmas or Easter, or fresh produce that might only be around for a short time before being replaced by later varieties, or crops from a different country, rarely hang around for long. So snap them up as soon as you see them. Once you have the entry form and qualifier safe in your hands you can sit back and relax, using the weeks or months remaining until the closing date to hone your tiebreaker to perfection.
Although entry form suppliers provide a useful, sometimes essential, service for many compers, it’s never a good idea to become completely dependent on them. Most tend to send out forms only in the month that a competition closes, and if a particular form was originally issued months earlier then the qualifier – perhaps a product at a special price, or a till receipt to be dated within a particular period – might have become impossible to obtain. So, if you can, try to use EF suppliers more as a safety net rather than your sole entry form source, and always do your best to get out and about yourself to look for forms. If you can’t manage this, always check Compers News and Chatterbox carefully for signs that a qualifier might have a short shelf life. And if so, take a gamble by getting that qualifier before you see the entry form. It could be a risk worth taking, since potential pitfalls like this will invariably keep entry numbers down as other people fall into exactly the same traps that you’ve made a deliberate effort to avoid.
Moving away from comps that seem to run and run, at the other end of the scale we have promotions with extremely short closing dates. Again, these are often seasonal but can sometimes come about as a result of distribution problems delaying forms or packs reaching stores. In these cases, speed is not only desirable – it’s a necessity! But again, it’s an effort worth making because many people will be caught unawares and entry numbers will be lower. The best finds in this category will be comps with such a short closing date that it’s impossible for them to be featured in magazines like Compers News. Which, of course, isn’t much use to you if you rely solely on magazines like Compers News for your information! Another example of why it’s best, if you possibly can, to have a look around a few shops yourself once in a while to sniff out rare and short-life comps. And check out Chatterbox regularly for those last minute finds that turn up too late to be included in the main magazine.
But the two kinds of comp where speed is a real advantage are those with more than one closing date, and those where prizes are awarded on a ‘first come first served’ basis. I won’t insult your intelligence by going into too much detail with the latter category, since it’s obvious that the quicker you enter, the more likely you are to win. But where a comp has multiple closing dates, perhaps weekly or monthly draws, then it really does pay to get your entries in for the earliest possible date. Entry levels will always be lower, as special packs or entry forms may not be as widely available, the general public take a while to cotton on and even us compers might not be up to speed right at the start. Added to which, nothing whets a comper’s appetite more than the whiff of a prize, so when we all get wind of winners in the early draws, you can bet that we’ll all pile in with a vengeance later on. So always get in quick to beat the rush with this type of promotion.
So what then are the examples that I referred to in the very first sentence above? Admittedly a veritable hotchpotch covering most of the situations above, but all have hit the shelves in the last few weeks so are excellent examples of what I’ve been saying.
Despite having a relatively lengthy lead-in time before the first draw, the Walkers iPod promotion attracted more than TEN TIMES the number of entries for some of the later September draws, compared to the first couple of days. This reflects the pattern across similar promotions in the past – NutriGrain, Kit Kash, cokeauction et al – where, contrary to common sense perhaps dictating that entries might actually be more plentiful at the start as people are keener and have accumulated lots of entries ready for the off, the opposite invariably happens. So always be aware of this.
The Crusha Milkshake on-pack promotion required you to enter a code from the label to play an online game, with weekly closing dates, but despite trying extremely hard to find promotional bottles I didn’t succeed until the very last day of the first week’s comp. Having managed to actually enter the comp with just thirty minutes remaining before the first week’s deadline, the leader board showed that just two other people had managed to do the same – this in a comp with eleven weekly prizes. I’m the world’s worst computer game player so, needless to say, got a frankly pathetic score. But I still came third in the first week’s competition, and was in the prizes. Less than a week later, the leader board was full to overflowing – so beating the rush by just a couple of days made all the difference.
Staying with milkshake, Yazoo offered thousands of magic sets over several monthly draws. Everybody who entered the first draw won a prize – not surprising, since promotional packs only started to hit the shelves a week or so before the first closing date. And exactly the same thing happened last year, when they gave away footballs. Relatively small value prizes admittedly, but worth the cost of a stamp when success is almost assured.
Those of us who entered the Dairylea and McVities biscuit on-pack promotions early were able to take advantage of loopholes on the websites that made it almost impossible not to win. These were quickly rectified by the promoters, presumably as soon as they had been buried under an avalanche of prize claims, but are good examples of the early bird most definitely catching the worm. Cases like this come and go so quickly that they can never be included in Compers News, but they’ll always be discussed on Chatterbox whenever they’re discovered, so always try to check out the forums for the latest news.
And finally, there was a Carling text promotion exclusively at Asda – a very low profile comp, where it quickly became apparent that prizes were being given away on a first come, first served basis. Chatterboxers were able to clean up on that one in the day or so before the comp reached a wider audience, which again demonstrates how every second counts with comps like this. This particular example should also serve to remind us that the text comp, and even comping on the web, is a comparatively new phenomenon, with punters – and promoters – on something of a learning curve. Which could all mean rich pickings as lessons are learned, so take full advantage and try not to miss out on any opportunity.
These examples are not exhaustive – they’ve simply contrived to arrive on the scene together as if to emphasise the need for speed at so many different levels of our hobby. Of course, I’m not advocating that a leisurely and enjoyable pastime should suddenly become a frenetic, non-stop whirlwind of activity. But sometimes, a little added urgency really can pay dividends.
Smid On... Should You Have To Pay To Receive A Prize?
Here at Compers News, I receive lots of letters from readers asking whether prize or award notifications that they have received are genuine. So here is some advice that I hope is helpful.
Under current UK Sales Promotion guidelines, a letter telling you that you have won a prize in a competition should clearly state the name of the product or promoter, the title of the specific competition or prize draw that you entered, and the prize that you have won. The prize must either be enclosed with that letter, or if this is impractical (e.g. it may be a holiday or large item) the letter must give full details of how the prize is to be delivered to you. Under current guidelines, a bona fide competition prize must be delivered at NO COST to the winner.
So then, does the letter that you have received follow these guidelines? If not, then it doesn’t necessarily mean that the letter is an out-and-out con – more likely, it is probably just a clever sales letter rather than a true prize letter. But here are a few hints and tips to help you decide…
Does the letter refer to a SPECIFIC competition? And, if so, do you remember actually entering that competition? Probably stating the obvious here, but you can’t win a prize in a competition that you haven’t entered!
Does the letter come from overseas? If so, take extra care. UK laws don’t cover you overseas. And again ask yourself the question – did you actually enter a genuine competition by sending a postcard or entry form to an address abroad?
Are you asked to send any money? If so, under current guidelines, then you cannot have won a genuine prize. Time to check things out more closely...
READ THE SMALL PRINT – ALL OF IT!
The small print will ALWAYS tell you what you’ve actually “won” with one of these letters – if anything! So make sure that you read it, very carefully. And make sure that you fully understand it. Ask somebody else for a second opinion if there’s something that you don’t understand.
Can’t find any small print (‘Official Rules’ or ‘Terms and Conditions’)? Then throw the letter away… it’s illegal in the UK!
The small print is full of confusing mumbo jumbo and lots of fancy language? Again, I recommend throwing the letter in the bin, since a genuine letter will NEVER do this. If you’re not comfortable with ANY aspect of the letter, go with your instinct and don’t respond. And always remember the golden rule – if it seems too good to be true… then it probably is!
So what will the small print most likely tell you? In my experience, the type of letter that most of you ask about – the ones that come from grand sounding Claimant services, financial associates, verification bureaux etc. and usually asking for a processing, handling, bonus, delivery, insurance, importation, documentation, packing (etc. etc.) fee are letters designed to SELL you something. So the small print will probably tell you that your “guaranteed award” (note that they probably won’t use the word ‘prize’, since in reality you haven’t actually won anything!) is a product or service that you are effectively paying for with the “fee” that you’re asked to send. The main headline prize on your letter, despite the clever wording, has NOT already been won by you. At best, you’ll go into a further draw for it if and when you send them some money. At worst, you’ll merely qualify for the “next round” and will be asked to send even more money later on. So PLEASE be careful if you choose to respond to these kind of letters.
Some common phrases in these letters, and what they probably REALLY mean…
You’re GUARANTEED this JACKPOT OPPORTUNITY!
Well, you’re guaranteed the chance of winning the jackpot – in exactly the same way that buying a lottery ticket every Saturday guarantees you the opportunity that your six numbers will come up! So really, this is no guarantee of any prize at all.
You’re GUARANTEED this prize when you return the winning number!
Ah yes, but chances are that your number ISN’T the winning number….
You’ve won a £1,000 prize – GUARANTEED!
But most likely not £1,000 cash… more likely something like £1,000 worth of discount vouchers to use against something you might not need….
You’ve won a £500 cheque – GUARANTEED!
But again, almost certainly not a CASH cheque. Most likely a ‘gift cheque’… which is another name for those discount vouchers!
You’ve won a FOOD PROCESSOR – GUARANTEED!
Indeed, but don’t be fooled by the photo of the state-of-the-art model that comes with your letter. Your version is probably some cheap plastic hand-held effort!
You’ve DEFINITELY won a CASH prize – GUARANTEED!
Well, the smallest cash denomination in the UK is a one-pence piece – so your “guaranteed cash” prize could be anything from 1p upwards.
You’ve DEFINITELY won our STAR AWARD - GUARANTEED!
Don’t be fooled by this statement being accompanied by pictures of major prizes… your ‘prize’ could be absolutely anything. Beware too when terms like “award” or “gift” are used instead of “prize”. By law, a “prize” must be exactly that – whereas an “award” or “gift” can be dished out to anyone and everyone. If a letter avoids using the actual word “prize” when it’s telling you what you’ve ‘won’, then it’s probably the best indication that you haven’t really won a real prize at all!
Believe me, it’s obvious when you receive a “genuine” winning letter. They’ll carry the logo of the product or magazine that ran the competition, they’ll be specific and clear about HOW and WHAT you’ve won, and they won’t ask you for a single penny to receive your prize. Anything you receive that doesn’t fall into this category… take care!!
Most letters that you ask about ARE legal, and do meet all the current rules and regulations. But it’s up to you to read and understand the small print. For example, taking a couple of cases that many of you ask me about:
• A letter or scratchcard asking you to call a premium rate telephone number to find out what prize you’ve won is perfectly legal, as long as it tells you what the cost of the call will be. The small print must also tell you exactly what prizes are available, and the number of each. In most cases, it should also give you a free ‘no purchase necessary’ route where you can enter the promotion without paying for a lengthy premium rate phone call. Usually, it soon becomes pretty obvious what your prize or award is likely to be – at which point, it’s your decision whether the item that you’re likely to win is worth the cost of entering. Of course, you COULD strike it lucky and win a major prize… but get into the habit of reading the small print and weighing up your chances – sensibly and carefully.
• Some organisations offer to automatically enter you into competitions and prize draws in return for a fee. Again, this is perfectly legal as long as the full terms of the offer are set out in the small print – so again, it’s your responsibility to carefully read that small print and to decide whether the offer really is for you. We do know of people who have won prizes thanks to these organisations, so most are genuine – but we can’t emphasise enough that you MUST get into the habit of reading that small print so that you can fully understand what’s on offer.
So, I hope that you’ve got the message, but to summarise:
• ALWAYS read the small print of EVERY offer carefully.
• If there is no small print, or its wording is unclear, ambiguous, or makes no sense to you, throw the letter away.
• If the letter asks for money, and / or comes from overseas, take EXTRA care. And if you DO decide to proceed, only ever part with money that you can afford to lose.
• If you are in ANY doubt, seek further advice – either from friends or family, or from your local Trading Standards office. Their details are in the phone book.
One final thing to remember is that, as you begin to enter more competitions and prize draws, your name and address will start to make it on to more and more “competition entrant” mailing lists, and chances are that you’ll start receiving more and more ‘opportunities’ like this. So, it’s important that you quickly get into the habit of reading that small print. Sorry if I keep repeating this… but I really can’t emphasise it enough. It genuinely WILL make the “real” purpose of these letters clearer, and save disappointment and misunderstandings later on.
IMPORTANT WARNING - ALWAYS ignore and destroy ANY letter that comes from abroad, that tells you that you have definitely won a huge cash prize, but then asks you to pay a percentage of your ‘prize’ in advance as a handling fee. A letter like this is almost certainly fraudulent. At best, you’ll lose the advance money that you send them – and they’ll probably keep asking for more. At worst, they’ll get your bank account details and will then proceed to empty your account. There is no such thing as an “International Lottery”. And if you are told that you’ve won the “UK Lottery”, think about it. How do these people know? Do you give your name and address details when you buy a lottery ticket at your local shop? Of course not! So ALWAYS put these particular letters straight into the bin.
Smid On… Your Comping Questions
Why are some competitions only one entry per household? Surely they want to sell more of the product?
Not necessarily! Sometimes, the main objective of a promotion will be to build up a database of customers. In this case a company just wants your details – and will try its best to limit the work it has to do in order to get them. Always remember that companies never run competitions out of the kindness of their hearts. There’s always a commercial reason, a ‘hidden agenda’ if you like, which might be to increase sales, build up customer loyalty, develop a customer profile, etc. While a comp designed to increase sales will obviously encourage multiple entries, a promotion run for another reason has no need – more entries will just create more paperwork for the promoter.
People often bemoan the fact that it’s usually big competitions with loads of prizes that have the ‘one entry’ restriction. In these cases, the promoter may have deliberately made the promotion more attractive with a bigger budget and a higher ratio of more attractive prizes specifically to encourage more people than usual to enter – ideally non-compers who might be attracted by a better chance of winning. It’s then in the company’s best interest to make sure the prizes are spread across as many people as possible. They’re not really interested in regular compers in exercises like this. Chances are, we appear on their databases many times already! You can, of course, get around the ‘one entry per household’ rule by being nice to friends and relatives.
When sending postcard entries, is it better to use standard white or picture ones?
Personally, I prefer picture ones if only because they’re slightly larger and thicker than standard white ones and so stand out better.
You can also make cards yourself by cutting sheets of coloured card to size, using old greetings cards, or even cutting up old cereal boxes. If you’re going to do this I recommend keeping the size and shape roughly the same as a normal postcard. In my opinion nothing shouts out desperation (or plays havoc at the local sorting office!) more than a huge circular postcard with zigzag edges written in fluorescent ink, but I know that some people will disagree!
Free picture postcards are widely available at cinemas, bars and restaurants. Just make sure that there’s not too much writing on the plain side (it can confuse the postman and possibly even the judges) and always check to ensure that the card you’re using is suitable and isn’t inadvertently advertising a rival product or service! You can also buy picture postcards in bulk from a good comping supplier such as www.compingessentials.co.uk
Is it worth decorating postcards?
I know that some people swear by decorating their cards, but it’s something that I personally never do. Certainly, if ever I was judging a competition I’d avoid decorated entries like the plague (you may as well just write “professional comper” on the card and be done with it in my opinion) – but that’s just me!
The consensus seems to be that decorated cards have a negligible effect in national promotions, but more success in smaller, local comps. Locally you may have a lower number of entries where your work of art will stand out better, or a more inexperienced judge where your cynical attempt at manipulation will be misinterpreted as a nice touch or extra special effort. But really, it’s up to you. Instead of a full-on assault with highlighter pens, stickers, glitter and the like, why not try a more subtle approach? An especially relevant picture postcard, for example. Or an eye-catching stamp (there are so many to choose from these days). Maybe make a card from suitable product packaging, or think of a witty speech bubble to write next to the stamp. But then again, if you prefer the ‘in yer face’ approach then go for it. There are competitions where this might be a valid, even sensible strategy (the aforementioned local comps, children’s comps, etc.) and I’ve heard of plenty of big winners who’ve used the decoration route. Who knows whether a prize was forthcoming because of – or despite! – the decoration. It’s whatever you’re happy with.
Is it better to write or use a printed label?
I always write my entries. It looks less professional and more personal. (Comping must be the only hobby where it’s better to dumb down - although I’ll stop short of recommending, as some do, that you deliberately crumple up entries or embellish them with coffee stains and teacup rings!)
A promoter likes to think that you’ve made an extra special effort to enter their particular competition, and not that theirs is just one of many. So many in fact that your comping is actually an industry and you have to use labels to save your valuable time. Of course, there will always be exceptions. Not enough space on an entry form for example, or a form printed on the inside of a greasy lard wrapper, or even terrible handwriting! Even here you should be careful though, as there can be security implications – has a label been improperly used to deliberately obliterate the real entrant’s details, for example? But always check the rules carefully before even considering a label. They may stipulate that you write your entry, in which case using a label for whatever reason will most likely get you disqualified.
Can I send more than one competition entry form in an envelope to save postage?
Unless the rules specifically limit you to one entry per envelope, yes you can. But personally, I don’t think that this is a good idea.
If it’s a draw, envelopes may not be opened so all of your efforts may be wasted. And even if they are opened, your entries will be grouped together. Much better to send them at intervals throughout the promotion so that your entries are spread around. This doesn’t matter if a promoter simply puts entries onto a computer as soon as they arrive, but how often do we know the precise form that the judging and drawing of a competition is going to take? Much better to be on the safe side.
With tiebreaker comps, your envelope should at least be opened of course (!) but there’s a danger that too many entries together might flag you up as a professional comper. Also, there’s the possibility of “death by association” – your one, brilliant slogan might get overlooked if it’s sandwiched between a few dodgy efforts!
Bear in mind too that if you put all of your eggs in one basket, then it only needs something unfortunate to happen to that one envelope and all your chances will be instantly ruined. Loss or delay by the post office, for example, or your entries being processed by someone at the handling house who’s having a particularly bad day. Imagine the scene. You’ve sent in a whole load of slogans extolling the virtues of your partner and the person at the handling house whose job it is to shortlist entries has just split up from theirs. Everything will be all right next week when they’re back together again after a wonderfully romantic weekend away, but the day your envelope arrives…forget it! Safer to spread the load!
As for postcard competitions, Compers News lists those that we know can definitely go ‘All In One Envelope’ (AIOE) for your ease of reference. These envelopes are opened by the promoters and your postcards are individually sorted into their respective ‘hats’ before a winner is chosen. Not all promoters allow this though, so if we don’t list it as AIOE then don’t do it!
Why do some competitions have such pedantic rules?
How strict are judges at actually adhering to them?
The number one rule in comping is… stick to the rules!
Some Terms & Conditions are clearly ‘cut and paste’ jobs from previous promotions. Others may have been included following legal or industry guidelines - but without any thought being given to whether they’re actually suitable or relevant to a particular promotion. But unless there are glaring mistakes or inconsistencies such as contradicting addresses or closing dates (in which case Compers News will always try to find out the ‘true’ picture if time allows), we must work on the assumption that each rule is there for a purpose – and stick to it.
If the instructions tell us to ‘write’ our details, then write them we must. If a particular type of pen or ink colour is stipulated, then again be sure to do as you’re told (in this case, although it sounds petty, the promoter may be using scanners to automatically ‘read’ entries and so the type and colour of your writing will be important). Plain paper should mean exactly that – not coloured or lined, but plain white paper. If the rules refer to a ‘stamped’ envelope, use a stamp rather than the office franking machine (some promoters equate a franked entry with a potential ‘bulk’ entry, and so may disqualify it). A particular size of paper, asking for an SAE for no apparent reason… I’m sure you can think of plenty of other examples of seemingly petty rules, but it’s best to always try to stick to them.
For example, you may remember those “all of your money back in ten years time” –type offers that were fashionable a few years ago. These promotions had deliberately daunting terms and conditions, and depended on customers forgetting to claim several years down the line, or failing to read the small print and thus invalidating their claims. Some of the more outlandish reasons for refusing claims included the required ball point pen not being used, the wrong kind of post being used (one actually stipulated second class recorded delivery, for example), prohibited attachments being sent with the claim form – even if this was just a covering letter, forms being folded incorrectly, addresses not being copied and even punctuated precisely on outer envelopes… I could go on, but will instead simply emphasise that on average, less than 10% of claims in these types of promotion ever reached the payout stage. Hopefully there are no competition promoters out there deliberately setting these kind of traps to keep their workload down (well, OK, I’m fairly convinced that there’s at least one but my lips remain sealed on legal advice!), but you can solve any potential problems by ensuring that you stick rigidly to the rules – however nonsensical, petty, or downright pointless they may seem.
How much grace does a promoter usually give after a closing date, to allow for delays etc?
The closing date of a competition must always be considered sacrosanct. Whilst the odd promoter or handling house might add on a day or two to cover possible postal delays and the like, you should always work on the basis that this will NOT happen. Indeed, a promoter could find themselves in trouble if a closing date was extended without good reason. So always make sure that your entries arrive in plenty of time, and build in a few days yourself to cover potential delays.
Bear in mind too that some of the larger handling houses will have their own internal systems which your precious entry may need to work its way through – so allow time for that. Better to be safe than sorry, so I always allow a minimum of three working days for a first class letter, and a week for second class or Freepost. I always allow a further day where possible if my entry needs to go to a particular person or department number within the organisation, and yet another day if the address is a P O Box number (the post office might not service these every day). And if a closing date falls on a Saturday, Sunday or Monday, always pretend that it’s the preceding Friday. Most business mail services – and the handling houses themselves – grind to a halt at weekends. Of course, few of us are this organised and many of us have won prizes with entries posted at the very last minute. But it’s always best to make sure that your entry will arrive on time without having to trust to luck or the vagaries of the Royal Mail – and ALWAYS work on the basis that a closing date is set in stone!
Should I always put my phone number on all comps, regardless of prize value?
I prefer to put a phone number whenever it’s asked for, but really it depends on the ‘feel’ of the comp. A reputable promoter or handling house isn’t usually going to bombard you with unwanted calls, so I don’t have a problem letting them have my number. And on some occasions, the particular circumstances of a comp – size or timing of the prize, for example – may make the need for a phone number almost mandatory. But on the other side of the coin, a phone number requested for a kitchen, magazine subscription or timeshare comp might inevitably lead to obvious problems. Beware especially of promotions that tell you your phone number is your own personal “lucky number”, and that therefore you must provide it. This will invariably lead to trouble!
Another debate on this subject revolves around whether promoters will leave a message on your answerphone if you’re not available to take a winning call. Again, we can never know for sure – although I’d guess that a reputable promoter would always try to do so. This might not be the case if they need to contact winners quickly though – tickets for an event the following day maybe – so this is yet another area where you must make up your own mind.
At the end of the day, you can terminate an unsolicited sales call with a firm ‘no’ (or something less polite!), and a few such calls might be seen as a reasonable price to pay in return for the occasional genuine prize notification.
Money permitting, perhaps think about getting a cheap ‘pay as you go’ mobile phone for use solely as your ‘comp phone’. This will mean that you can keep your main number secret, and even the most basic phones these days have an automatic answerphone and caller identification. You’ll even be able to start entering all of those new fangled text comps!
It should be apparent – even if you have to use your comper’s “sixth sense” – why a phone number is being requested on an entry form. For genuine prize notification maybe, or for sales purposes, for adding to a general database, or simply for no particular reason save for it appearing in “The Promoter’s Bumper Book of Entry Form Design”. So it’s up to you what you choose to include and when. Never just leave the space blank though – always write ‘none’ or ‘n/a’, otherwise you could be disqualified for submitting an incomplete entry form! Bear in mind too, that if a promoter is looking for a particular kind of customer (dare I say winner?), then someone seemingly without a phone is viewed as inhabiting some kind of financial underclass these days. And that someone who puts the same contact number in the ‘day’ and ‘evening’ boxes probably doesn’t go out to work. None of which should make any difference when it comes to judging a competition of course, but you never know – especially if the comp is promoting an expensive or luxury item.
Till receipts are obviously specific to particular stores, but what about barcodes?
As a rule of thumb, a barcode on a product will be the same regardless of where you buy it. So when, for example, a comp asks for a “barcode from a pack purchased at Asda” as proof of purchase, you can safely buy a pack from anywhere and the handling house will be none the wiser! Care is sometimes needed though. Every single variant of a product – pack size, type or flavour for example – must have a different barcode. So don’t get caught out by sending in a code from a size or variety of a product that the supermarket running the competition doesn’t stock. Special offer packs, marked with a special price or containing extra free for example, will also have a different code, and while this code will be the same across every stockist, make sure that the special offer isn’t in fact exclusive to a particular store. And it goes without saying (I hope!) that the barcode on a tin of Asda brand beans will be different to Sainsbury’s, will be different to Tesco, etc. etc. even if the product inside the tin seems identical!
If a product starts to feature an on-pack promotion, this by itself won’t mean that the barcode has to alter – provided that there have been absolutely no changes to price or size, or indeed any aspect of the product itself. But I have known this to happen. Sometimes it helps the manufacturer to control and monitor stocks during the promotion. On other occasions it might be because special packs are produced at a different location, and a barcode must carry information to denote the place of manufacture of a product. So you may need to be wary – but again, once you have determined what the ‘valid’ barcode is, this should remain the same at every shop that sells the identical product.
One final word on this subject. When you’re asked to send in a barcode panel, ALWAYS include the numbers underneath! This might seem an obvious thing to say, but a surprisingly high number of friends (non compers admittedly) who have saved qualifiers for me in the past have just cut out the stripes! Now, although I have vivid memories of a gentleman once appearing on “You Bet!” and being able to identify not only a barcode number but also the exact product just from looking at said stripes, it’s fair to assume that most handling house employees will not possess such a skill! And without those telltale numbers, your entry could well end up in the bin.
I live in Surrey but have a comping pal in Scotland. Is it worth having a go at Scottish competitions from Surrey?
As long as the rules of a competition don’t prohibit ‘out of area’ entries, or they’re not obstructive in other ways (you might need to collect a prize personally for example, or be obliged to attend a presentation), you have nothing to lose – and potentially plenty to gain – by giving this kind of comp a go. And if you are lucky enough to win, and this for some reason creates problems, then you simply tell them that you were staying with your comping pal (or alternatively was simply visiting the area) when you found out about the comp. Easy! I think that, in practice, if a promoter doesn’t want an ‘outsider’ to win their comp then they’ll simply ignore your entry and you’ll be none the wiser. But I’ve heard of enough winners in such circumstances over the years to make me say that it’s always worth a try.
I recently read about an instant win comp where no major prizes were awarded. Surely this is wrong. Can anyone investigate?
It’s a point that I keep hammering home, but rightly or wrongly prizes in an instant win promotion do NOT have to be awarded. There are, however, a couple of legal obligations that a promoter running an instant win comp must fulfil. Firstly (and most importantly), they must be able to produce an independently audited statement showing that all winning labels or game pieces were actually issued – on a fair and random basis. Secondly, there must be no ‘unreasonable or administrative barriers’ to prevent a winner finding out what they have won or claiming their prize.
This second requirement is a bit too subjective for my liking. Were the instructions for the Ribena promotion, for example, which spelt out the need for a competent adult to actually jump on the carton in a particular way in order to reveal the winning message ‘unreasonable’? Is the latest trend for having to double-check numbers on a special phone line or website an unnecessary ‘administrative barrier’?
Whatever you think, if you see the results for an instant win and they start ringing alarm bells – perhaps because of the lack of winners, or the geographical spread – which suggest that these Code requirements may not have been met, then the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) should be your first port of call. They can ask a promoter to supply the necessary evidence, and will rule on the fairness or otherwise of a promotion. One instant win comp where they were asked to do this was a Doritos promotion, where the complainant challenged a “1 in 4 packs is a winner” claim, and it was then up to the promoter to prove that the claim was true. They were able to do this, very convincingly it must be said, but I would guess that there are many, many instant win promoters out there who would fail miserably. So if you feel particularly strongly about any promotion, just ask the ASA to look into it. I know that many of us don’t like complaining about comps for fear that we’re biting the hand that feeds us, but an ASA referral is not necessarily a complaint. The ASA will ask for no more paperwork than a competent promoter should have kept anyway, and if nothing else it keeps the industry on its toes.
You can contact them online at www.asa.org.uk (where you’ll also find a very easy referral form to complete), or write to them at 2 Torrington Place, London WC1E 7HW.
There seems to be a lot of dubious Terms and Conditions appearing lately. How can promoters get away with it?
You gave three examples with your question, and as dodgy as I admit they sound I’m afraid that they’re all perfectly legal.
Prizes will only be awarded if entries of a sufficient quality are received.
Another subjective test, but the ASA Code states that “withholding prizes can be justified… if promoters have told consumers at the outset that entries of insufficient quality will lead to the withholding of prizes”. I’ve never known this clause to ever actually be invoked in a competition though, and I’d like to think that most promoters just put it into their T&Cs to cover themselves under the Code.
I had a conversation with a promoter recently, and apparently we’d all be amazed at how many incomplete, unreadable, uncontactable, unhygienic and, in the case of tiebreakers, downright offensive entries are received for the average competition. I think that it’s this kind of entry that the clause is designed to cover, although the wording could obviously be interpreted differently (and, sad to say, probably successfully!) by an unscrupulous promoter if they so choose.
The prize will be withdrawn if it is not claimed within 48 hours of the winner being notified
This is a new one that has started to appear fairly recently, and I must admit that I don’t like it one bit. We’ve always had clauses along the lines of prizes being redrawn or awarded to someone else if the original winner misses out for some reason, but the latest form of words seems to suggest that prizes simply won’t be awarded at all if they’re not claimed. But again, this is allowable under the Code – “withholding prizes can be justified if participants have not met clear criteria set out in the promotional rules”. So as long as the terms are clearly laid out at the outset, it’s an acceptable practice. And there’s nothing in the Code to say that such prizes must be re-awarded if ‘reasonable efforts’ to contact a winner fail.
Once again, following on from my conversation with the promoter, we should never underestimate the number of winners who can’t be contacted, or who don’t claim their prizes. A ridiculous state of affairs for us hardened compers I know, but a fact nonetheless. So this clause could save a promoter a lot of money if they were so inclined (which, to the cynics among us, could explain why it has started to appear!) – but it’s still legal. Note, however, that the Institute of Sales Promotion (ISP) suggests that 28 days is a reasonable, ‘best practice’ period of time in these circumstances – so if you’re ever left in the lurch by a shorter timescale being imposed, then you may wish to seek ISP advice.
The prize will only be awarded if an all-correct entry is received
Usually seen in an estimation comp, or an order-of-merit. As unfair as this may seem, it’s perfectly acceptable under the same Code clause mentioned above. The only obligation for a Promoter is that they clearly set out the criteria for awarding prizes in the competition rules. It’s then up to you to decide whether it’s worth entering. If you think that a task is so outlandish and unfair that to win a prize is nigh on impossible, then avoid it. Easy! Although remember that the National Lottery has probably the most ridiculous odds of all, and millions of us play that every week. The thrill of the chase? Having to be in it to win it? The final decision can only be yours, but provided the Promoter has published all of the relevant details up front, then I’m afraid they’re covered.
