Lessons from the past!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 twenty-five 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 booklet that I was reading – ‘How to Win Prizes’ by Aubrey Morris, should you wish to try to track down a copy – 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!
EEEE BY GUM
Thanks for all of your entries to my summer competition, which ran in the July issue. Debate on Chatterbox was certainly heated, with some of you loving the task but most of you distinctly underwhelmed. All I can say to the complainers is that you should count yourselves lucky that it was only Compers News you needed to check, and not an entire dictionary or the Bible – which were popular choices of the original question setters sixty-odd years ago. Anyway, if it’s any consolation, there’ll never be another comp like it in this column again. What a fool I’ve been! My smug expectation that our esteemed editor would have the latest state-of-the-art technology at her fingertips and would be able to supply me with the answer at the push of a button proved dramatically wide of the mark, and so I’ve had to count along with the rest of you. I’ve double-checked my answer, with the help of family and friends, and arrived at 8,666. I accept that, with the best will in the world, one or two may have slipped through the net, so I’ve accepted all answers within 5 either side of this total as correct. Congratulations to Julie Davies from Wigan, whose fascinating fact that “8,666 employers did it online in 2002” – a juicy titbit verified by the Inland Revenue website – was judged to be the best tiebreaker. A year has been added to your Compers News subscription. Such was the high number and standard of entries that we decided to award an extra prize of a 3 months subscription to the best overall tiebreaker, irrespective of the number of Es counted. This prize went to Louise Saunders from the Isle of Skye, who supported her answer of 8,155 with “recorded population of 2000 in Guinea: 8,154. Would have been 8,155 but Juan was missing!” Well, it made me laugh anyway. Thanks and commiserations to everyone else who entered.
SMID’S GRAND AUTUMN COMPETITION
Before you all start groaning, this one isn’t quite so bad… promise!
Hidden in my article this month (which, for the avoidance of doubt, starts with the ‘A Smorgasbord of Smid’ heading above and ends with my name in big letters below!) are the names of several trees. They can be names on their own, parts of longer words, or even consecutive letters spread over two or more words. And every type of tree counts, so think laterally. Simply make a list of all the trees that you can find (only one of each please, even if the same name appears more than once) – and please provide a brief explanation with any names where you’re being really clever and you think it might go over my head (I won’t be offended, honest!). The person who finds the largest number will be the winner. There’s no correct answer as such – although I’ve deliberately included plenty of names in the article, so am aware of a minimum number, I’m sure that there are plenty of ‘accidental’ answers too so every entry will be judged individually on its merits.
Then, for a tiebreaker, complete the following sentence in an apt and humorous way in 15 words or less:
Compers News is TREEmendous because…
Your sentence MUST include AT LEAST FIVE of the trees on your list – once again, these can be words on their own, parts of longer words, or consecutive letters spread across two or more words. It’s entirely up to you!
The prize is A 12-MONTH EXTENSION TO YOUR COMPERS NEWS SUBSCRIPTION, and the closing date is 31 October 2004. Please send your answers and tiebreaker, along with your name and address, to “Smid’s Forest” at the usual CN address. You must be a current Compers News subscriber to enter, and only one entry per person is allowed. The winning entry will be published in the November issue. Good luck!
For those of you who were in heaven counting Es, and are all fired up to do something similar again, I may just have the perfect Christmas gift for yew. Watch this space for details of another poplar monkey-puzzle of a counting game coming soon!
Smid x
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