What Are The Chances!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 current promotions. Heinz are 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 is unusual in that they give much more information in the small print than usual about prize distribution. When you read these details in conjunction with the sales volume of the participating brands gleaned from various websites, you arrive 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 has told us that the current promotion will 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 are more than 50 to one against. And if that isn’t bad enough, even if you do 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 are a minuscule one in 106,000. In fact, ignoring the free crisps altogether (the last thing that many of us who have ‘embraced’ this particular promotion wants is 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. Indeed, even the most dedicated ‘smidder’ must occasionally throw in the towel and resign themselves to trusting to Lady Luck.
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 or four 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 run a similar promotion before, then your memory of how long their last 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!
In conclusion, let’s consider the title of this article one more time. What are the chances with instant wins? Not very high sadly, certainly for the bigger prizes as opposed to dodgy consolation prizes such as ringtones, 20p coupons and the like. I can’t even offer encouragement by proclaiming that “someone HAS to win”, because with instant wins they don’t! But providing you keep your feet firmly on the ground, and view your chances in a realistic context, there’s no harm in at least giving it a go. What are the chances? None at all if you don’t even try, that’s for sure.
Smid x
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