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In Promotions

The Kill Sheet: Pressure-Testing a Promotion Before Launch

Most promotions that fail were always going to fail. Not because of bad luck or a soft market — because something in the design was broken before the first entry arrived. And the uncomfortable part is how visible those flaws usually are in hindsight: a cashback set just below the effort of claiming it, an entry form asking for ten fields when it needed four, a single hero prize nobody genuinely believed they could win. Everyone in the launch meeting could have spotted the problem. Nobody was asked to look for it.

That’s the job of the Kill Sheet. It comes from The Shelf Truth, the promotional strategy guide we published at Trevor Services, and it exists for one reason: the cheapest time to find out a promotion won’t work is before it launches.

What is the Kill Sheet?

The Kill Sheet is a 15-minute pre-launch diagnostic for promotional campaigns. It tests an idea against the small set of failure points that sink most promotions — a muddled objective, reward maths that don’t work from the shopper’s side, too much entry friction, and unmanaged budget exposure — before any money is committed.

It is deliberately not a creative review. It doesn’t ask whether the idea is clever, on-brand, or likely to win an award. It asks whether the mechanics underneath the idea can actually deliver what the brand needs. A promotion can pass the Kill Sheet and still be dull — that’s a different problem — but a promotion that fails it will not be rescued by better creative. The rest of this article walks through the questions.

Does the promotion have one job?

The first check is the One Job Rule: a promotion should be built to do one thing — drive trial, drive frequency, build baskets, or capture data. Not all four.

This is the check that kills the most ideas, because promotions accumulate objectives the way meetings accumulate attendees. The brief starts as a trial driver, then someone adds a data-capture requirement, then a loyalty element, then a request to lift basket size while we’re at it. Each addition sounds costless. Each one adds a form field, a condition, or a compromise to the prize structure, and the mechanic ends up doing four jobs badly instead of one job well. If you can’t state the single objective in one sentence — and name the metric that will prove it worked — stop there. Fifteen minutes well spent.

Would the shopper do the maths?

The second check is the shopper’s side of the deal, and the framework here is the 3-Second Equation: reward plus belief, divided by friction. A shopper standing at a shelf gives a promotion about three seconds of thought. The reward has to feel worth it, they have to believe they could actually receive it, and the effort of participating has to feel proportionate.

Each part of that equation is a place ideas die. A reward can sit below the Insult Threshold — an amount so small that asking someone to upload a receipt for it does more brand damage than no promotion at all. Belief collapses when the prize structure is one distant jackpot; it recovers when there are enough winners that winning feels possible, which is why how you distribute a prize pool is usually a more important decision than how big it is. And friction compounds quietly: every extra field on an entry form, every additional step between purchase and claim, costs a share of the entries you would otherwise have received. In the campaigns we process at Trevor Services, the promotions that underperform their forecasts are far more often over-complicated than under-funded.

What happens if it works too well — or barely at all?

Budget exposure runs in both directions, and the Kill Sheet asks about both.

If the promotion works better than planned, what is the liability? An uncapped cashback or gift-with-purchase offer scales with every qualifying sale, and a genuinely appealing offer on a high-volume product can redeem well past the forecast. There are established ways to manage this — capping redemptions, structuring the offer, or insuring the promotion so the downside is a known premium rather than an open-ended cost. The failure isn’t having exposure; it’s launching without having decided how much of it you’re carrying.

If it works worse than planned, the question flips: does the budget only make sense at a low redemption rate? Cashback budgets in particular often lean on slippage — the share of eligible buyers who never get around to claiming. Slippage is real and it’s a legitimate part of cashback economics, but a budget that collapses if claiming turns out to be easy is a budget built on hope. Write down the redemption rate the plan assumes, and what happens at double that rate. If the answer is unpresentable, the idea needs restructuring, not optimism.

What are the questions nobody asks until launch week?

The last section of the Kill Sheet is the unglamorous one, and it’s where execution quietly decides the outcome. Does the promotion need a trade promotion permit? In Australia the answer depends on the mechanic and the states involved — games of chance generally need authorisation in NSW, the ACT and South Australia — we’ve covered the state permit rules separately — and permit lead times don’t negotiate with launch dates. Who validates the receipts, and what happens when someone submits the same one twice? Who pays the winners, how fast, and through what channel? None of these are interesting questions in the planning meeting. All of them are very interesting three days after launch.

The same goes for the market you’re launching into. A mechanic that looks fresh in the boardroom may be the fourth of its kind in the category this quarter, and the shopper at the shelf sees all four. It’s worth spending ten minutes checking what’s actually live before committing — our colleagues at Bamboo Marketing wrote a good piece on using competitive intelligence in promotional design that covers how to do this properly. At Trevor we lean on Trudy, our promotional intelligence platform, which tracks a couple of hundred live Australian promotions at any given time — enough to know quickly whether your instant win is a point of difference or wallpaper.

Fifteen minutes, honestly answered

The Kill Sheet only works if the answers are honest, which is harder than it sounds when a room full of people already likes the idea. That’s the real reason to run it as a named, deliberate step rather than trusting that someone will speak up: it gives the sceptic a mandate. One job, named and measurable. Shopper maths that survive three seconds of scrutiny. Budget exposure that’s been decided rather than discovered. Permits, validation and payment answered before launch week. An idea that clears those hurdles has earned its budget.

If you’ve got a promotion on the whiteboard and you want it pressure-tested by people who’ve seen a few hundred of them run, we’re happy to talk it through.

Admin
In Promotions

Slippage: Why a Cashback Costs Less Than a Discount

There’s a moment in most promotional budget conversations where a cashback and a discount get treated as the same thing. Both are “$100 off”, so both get costed at $100 a unit. Anyone who has run a cashback knows that’s not how it plays out — and the difference runs in the brand’s favour. A meaningful share of the people who buy on the promise of a cashback never get around to claiming it. A discount, by contrast, is applied at the till every single time, whether the shopper even noticed the promotion or not.

That gap has a name, it has decades of research behind it, and it’s the single most important number in a cashback budget. It’s also routinely left out of the planning conversation, which is how brands end up either overpaying for a promotion or — worse — getting a nasty surprise when claims come in higher than the finance team assumed.

What is slippage in a cashback promotion?

Slippage is the percentage of eligible buyers who never claim the cashback they’re entitled to. Because unclaimed cashbacks cost the brand nothing, a cashback’s true cost is its face value multiplied by the redemption rate — not the face value itself — which is why a cashback almost always costs less than a discount of the same headline amount.

In The Shelf Truth we treat slippage as one of the core Budget Hacker levers, and it’s worth being clear-eyed about what it is and isn’t. It isn’t a loophole, and it isn’t something you should be trying to maximise. It’s a behavioural reality: people buy with good intentions, then life happens. The receipt goes in the bin, the claim window closes, the form gets abandoned halfway. Your job as a marketer isn’t to engineer that outcome — it’s to forecast it accurately and budget accordingly.

Why a cashback costs less than a discount of the same size

The arithmetic is simple: a discount reaches 100% of buyers, a cashback reaches only the ones who claim. What surprises most people is how far below 100% claim rates actually sit.

The best public data comes from a 2023 study by Tremendous and The Decision Lab, which found digital rebates of $20 or less were claimed only around 38% of the time, rising to roughly 50% for $50 rebates. Even generous offers leave a substantial share unclaimed. The academic literature backs this up: a Marketing Science paper on slippage in rebate programs ties the effect to present-biased preferences — the purchase happens now, the claiming effort comes later, and later is where good intentions go to die.

In the appliance cashback campaigns Trevor Services runs, we see the same pattern from the other side: actual claim volumes routinely land well under the pre-campaign forecast — sometimes at half of it or less. That’s not a failure of the promotion. It’s what cashbacks do, and it’s precisely why a $200 cashback on a $2,000 appliance can be materially cheaper to fund than a 10% discount — while looking just as generous on the shelf ticket.

There’s a second-order effect worth knowing about too. The same Tremendous study found the payment method changes what the offer is worth in the shopper’s head: mailed cheques and store credit shaved anywhere from $16 to $130 in perceived value off a $300 rebate compared with cash or a prepaid card. Pay people slowly and awkwardly and you’re funding a promotion the shopper mentally discounts before they’ve even bought.

How do you forecast a redemption rate?

You forecast a redemption rate from four inputs: the claim value, the effort required to claim, the length of the claim window, and the payment method — benchmarked against comparable past campaigns rather than gut feel.

Claim value is the strongest driver. The Tremendous data above shows claim rates climbing steadily with the amount at stake, which passes the common-sense test: nobody forgets a $500 cashback on a kitchen bundle the way they forget a $10 one on a kettle. Effort is the counterweight — every extra step between “I bought it” and “I’ve been paid” pushes some claimants out. This is the same mental maths shoppers run at the shelf, which we’ve written about as the 3-Second Equation, just applied at the claim stage instead of the purchase stage. The claim window matters more than most brands assume: a short window increases slippage but also increases complaints, and an overly long one makes the liability hard to close out. And payment method shapes both the claim rate and the perceived value, per the research above — which is why instant payouts via PayID have become the default recommendation on the campaigns Trevor Services delivers, ahead of cheques and slow EFT runs.

This is also where history beats intuition. A brand running its first cashback is guessing; a platform that has processed claims across many campaigns is not. It’s exactly the problem Trevor Services built Trudy for — pulling redemption patterns from thousands of historical promotions to put a defensible number against a new campaign’s forecast, instead of a hopeful one. If you’d rather do it manually, the honest starting point is your own last comparable campaign, adjusted for anything you’ve changed about value, effort, window, or payout. If you have no comparable campaign, assume more slippage at low claim values and less at high ones, and make sure your budget still survives if claims come in well above the forecast. Slippage is a forecast, not a guarantee — the brands that get burnt are the ones who booked the savings before the claims arrived.

Budget for slippage — don’t engineer it

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Once you understand that unclaimed cashbacks are free, there’s an obvious temptation: make claiming harder, and slippage goes up. Long forms, obscure claim portals, receipt requirements designed to trip people up, 14-day windows. It works, in the narrowest sense. It’s also a bad trade.

The shoppers who do fight through a deliberately awful claim process arrive at the payout annoyed, and the ones who give up remember why. We’ve called this the Insult Threshold — the point where the effort of claiming outweighs the reward and the offer starts costing you goodwill instead of buying it. A cashback exists to change purchase behaviour at the shelf; it does that job whether or not every buyer claims. Engineering slippage doesn’t improve the promotion, it just quietly converts a brand-building expense into a source of complaints. Where a cashback sits alongside the rest of the campaign — and what job it’s actually there to do — is a design question worth settling early, and Bamboo’s piece on campaign architecture is a good place to start on that.

The better posture: make claiming as easy as validation allows, pay fast, and let slippage be whatever honest slippage turns out to be. You’ll still come in well under the cost of an equivalent discount, and the people who claim will have had a good experience with your brand at the exact moment you handed them money — which is a rare and valuable combination.

If you’re costing a cashback against a discount and want a realistic redemption number to plan around rather than a guess, we’re happy to talk it through.

Admin
In Analytics

Who Handles Cashback Promotion Redemption in Australia?

The front end of a cashback offer is the easy part — a burst on the pack or a banner on the product page promising $100 back on a washing machine. The part that decides whether the promotion builds goodwill or burns it happens after the purchase: the claim form, the receipt check, the approval email, and the wait for money to land. That back half is called redemption, and in Australia it’s usually run by a specialist provider rather than the brand itself. This article covers what redemption actually involves, who does this work, and how to judge whether it’s being done well.

What is cashback promotion redemption?

Cashback promotion redemption is the process of collecting, validating and paying customer claims after a qualifying purchase — checking receipts, screening for fraud, and transferring the cashback by EFT, PayID or prepaid card. In Australia, brands typically outsource this to a specialist redemption and fulfilment provider such as Trevor Services, which runs the claim platform, validation and payment on the brand’s behalf.

It’s worth being precise about the category, because search results muddle it. Consumer cashback platforms like ShopBack pay shoppers a percentage back on everyday purchases through their own app — that’s a consumer-facing membership product. Card-linked offers from banks are something else again. A brand-funded cashback promotion — Sony offering a bonus cashback on cameras, or an air conditioning brand offering $500 back on a ducted system — needs the other kind of partner: a company that builds the claim journey, validates the proof of purchase, and pays the customer. That’s the redemption provider’s job, and it’s the work Trevor Services does for brands like Electrolux.

Who can run a cashback promotion in Australia?

Any brand can. Unlike a prize draw, a cashback isn’t a game of chance — every valid claim gets paid — so the trade promotion permit regime that governs prize draws (an NSW authority for prize pools over $10,000, an ACT permit above $3,000) generally doesn’t apply. What absolutely does apply is the Australian Consumer Law: the ACCC’s rules on advertising and promotions cover misleading conduct, and a cashback advertised prominently but made hard to claim is exactly the kind of practice that attracts attention. The compliance burden on a cashback isn’t the permit — it’s the gap between what the headline promises and what the terms and the claim experience deliver.

The practical barrier isn’t legal, it’s operational. A national appliance cashback can generate tens of thousands of claims, each one carrying a receipt image that needs to be read, matched to an eligible model and purchase window, checked against previous claims from the same household, and then paid to a bank account the customer typed in themselves. Doing that manually doesn’t scale, and doing it badly is worse than not running the offer at all.

What does a redemption provider actually do?

The visible part is the claim site — a branded page where the customer enters their details, uploads a receipt, and picks how they want to be paid. The invisible part is where the work is. Receipt validation, increasingly OCR-assisted, confirms the product, retailer and date fall within the offer. Fraud controls catch the patterns a human reviewer would miss at volume: the same receipt cropped four ways, serial numbers recycled across claims, velocity spikes from a single address. Then comes payment — and payment method matters more than most brands assume. Sony’s current Australian cashback terms allow 28 business days for an EFT after approval; GENERAL’s ducted cashback pays up to $500 on a digital prepaid Mastercard. On the campaigns Trevor Services runs, payment windows of up to eight weeks are commonly written into terms as a safety margin — but paying well inside that window, ideally instantly via PayID, is one of the cheapest goodwill wins available in promotional marketing.

A good provider also carries the paperwork: terms that match the mechanics, claim records that survive an audit, and reporting that tells the brand in real time how redemption is tracking against forecast. That last one matters for budgeting, because cashback economics rest on the gap between buyers and claimants — what The Shelf Truth calls slippage. Some buyers never claim, which is why a cashback usually costs less than the equivalent shelf discount. But slippage has to be forecast honestly, not hoped for: if the redemption rate runs ahead of the assumption baked into the budget, the brand needs to know in week two, not at reconciliation.

How fast should customers be paid?

Faster than the terms require. The customer has already done what the brand wanted — bought the product — and every day between claim and payment is a day the brand is holding their money. The Shelf Truth’s insult threshold applies here in a second way: an offer can clear the threshold on value and still fail on experience, because a $100 cashback that takes eight weeks and two follow-up emails to arrive feels like a rebate scheme from 2005. Real-time payment rails changed what’s possible — PayID and Osko transfers land in minutes, not weeks — and a validated claim paid the same day does more for repeat purchase than most loyalty mechanics costing far more.

What should a brand look for in a redemption partner?

Four things, roughly in order. First, validation depth: can they actually read receipts at volume and catch fraud, or is “validation” a person eyeballing uploads? Second, payment options: EFT is table stakes; PayID, eGift cards and prepaid cards should all be on the menu, because the right answer differs by audience. Third, reporting: live claim and redemption dashboards, not a spreadsheet at campaign end. Fourth, evidence: named clients and campaigns they’ll stand behind. Trevor Services runs cashback redemption on Salesforce for brands including Electrolux, and uses Trudy — its promotional intelligence platform — to pressure-test cashback tiers and redemption forecasts against historical campaign data before an offer goes to market.

One thing a redemption provider won’t do is make a weak offer strong. If the cashback is too small for the effort, or invisible at the point of purchase, the back end can’t rescue it — getting the offer noticed at the shelf is its own discipline, and Bamboo Marketing’s piece on retail activation covers that side well. But between a claim submitted and money landing, execution is the whole game.

If you’re planning a cashback and working out how the redemption side should run — or you’ve run one before and the claims experience hurt — we’re happy to talk it through. For the mechanics of the entry side, our guide to how cashback promotions work in Australia is the place to start.

Admin
In Analytics

How Promotion Winners Get Paid in Australia

The entry forms are closed, the draw is done, and somewhere a customer has just found out they’ve won. For most of the campaign, the brand has been in control of the experience. From this point on, the customer is. Whether they walk away telling people about it or quietly deciding never to enter another one of your promotions comes down to something that rarely gets planned with the same care as the creative: how, and how quickly, they actually get paid.

Prize fulfilment is the part of a promotion that happens after the interesting bit is over, which is exactly why it gets underinvested. A brief will run to pages on the mechanic and the prize pool and then treat “we’ll pay the winners” as a single line, as if it were a formality. It isn’t. It’s the one moment the whole thing is judged on, and it’s where a well-designed campaign either lands or leaks.

What is prize fulfilment?

Prize fulfilment is the process of getting the reward to the person who won it — verifying the winner is eligible, collecting the details needed to pay them, disbursing the prize through the right channel, and keeping the records that prove it was done properly. It covers cash payouts, gift cards, vouchers, and physical goods, and it sits alongside the compliance obligations that come with awarding prizes in Australia.

That definition sounds tidy on paper. In practice, fulfilment is where a promotion meets the messy reality of bank details that don’t match, winners who’ve changed email addresses, prizes that go unclaimed, and state rules that dictate what you’re allowed to do next. It’s operational work, and the campaigns that handle it well tend to be the ones that treated it as real work from the start.

How do promotion winners actually get paid?

There’s no single answer, and the channel you choose shapes how the win feels. A cash prize can be paid in a few different ways, and the gap between the fastest and slowest is enormous.

At one end, real-time payments have changed what “instant” means. Payments made through Osko on the New Payments Platform settle in around 15 to 30 seconds, any time of day, using nothing more than the winner’s PayID or account details. For an instant-win mechanic, that closes the loop while the customer is still holding their phone — they win, they enter a PayID, the money lands. The dopamine hit the promotion was designed to create doesn’t get diluted by a two-week wait.

At the other end sits the traditional cashback, still usually paid by EFT or BPAY in a batch after the redemption window closes. In campaigns we run, it’s common for a cashback to tell customers to allow up to eight weeks for payment after the claim period ends — not because the money isn’t ready, but because claims are validated, checked for fraud, and paid in cycles. That’s a legitimate model, but it’s a different promise, and the terms have to be honest about it. The fastest way to sour a good cashback is to imply speed you can’t deliver.

Between those two you’ve got eGift cards and digital vouchers, which are quick to issue and easy to track, and physical prizes, which bring their own logistics — dispatch, delivery, and the awkward reality that a major prize sometimes needs a signature and a courier, not an email. The point isn’t that one channel is better. It’s that the payout method is a design decision with a customer-experience consequence, and it should be chosen deliberately rather than defaulted into.

The compliance layer most briefs skip

Paying the winner is only half of fulfilment. The other half is proving you did it correctly, and Australian promotions carry obligations that don’t disappear just because the draw went smoothly.

The permit thresholds are the part people know about. In New South Wales, a trade promotion needs an authority once the total prize value exceeds $10,000. In the ACT, the threshold is a $3,000 total prize pool. In South Australia, a licence is needed once the prize pool reaches $5,001, and any draw where the total prize value is $30,000 or more has to be scrutinised by an independent party. If you’re running nationally, you’re running to the strictest of these, not the most convenient. We covered the full picture in our state-by-state guide to promotional permits.

The part that catches people out is what happens when a prize goes unclaimed. You can’t just keep it. NSW’s rules say the operator must make every reasonable effort to contact the winner, and where the promotion’s own terms don’t set a timeframe, the prize has to be held for at least three months before a new winner can be drawn. That’s why the redraw provisions in your terms and conditions aren’t boilerplate — they’re the thing that tells you, and the regulator, exactly what to do when someone wins and then vanishes. It’s worth writing them before the campaign runs, not scrambling for them after. Getting the terms and conditions right upstream is what makes fulfilment clean downstream.

None of this is exotic. It’s just the operational reality that a compliant promotion has a paper trail — who won, how they were verified, when they were paid, and what happened to anything unclaimed. On a Salesforce-native platform like the one Trevor Services runs, that trail is a by-product of the process rather than a spreadsheet someone has to reconstruct in a hurry when a client asks.

Where fulfilment quietly goes wrong

The failures are rarely dramatic. They’re small, and they compound. A winner-notification email lands in spam and the prize sits unclaimed. A bank detail is entered with a transposed digit and the payment bounces without anyone noticing for a fortnight. A physical prize is dispatched to an address that’s three months out of date. Individually, each is a minor operational hiccup. Collectively, they’re the difference between a winner who posts about their prize and one who tells a call centre they’ve been waiting a month.

This is where the same thinking that shapes the front of a promotion applies to the back of it. The Shelf Truth talks about the insult threshold — the point at which the effort of claiming a reward outweighs the reward itself. A slow, confusing, or error-prone payout is that same insult arriving after the customer has already won, which is arguably worse. They did their part. The friction they hit now is entirely yours.

Predictive tools help here too. Trudy, our promotional intelligence platform, draws on patterns across thousands of past campaigns, and one of the more useful things it surfaces is realistic expectations for claim rates and timing — so the fulfilment plan is built for the volume you’ll actually see, not the volume the optimistic version of the brief assumed.

How long should it take to pay a winner?

As fast as the mechanic promised and no slower. An instant win that takes a week isn’t an instant win. A cashback that quotes eight weeks and pays in six is keeping its word; one that quotes two weeks and pays in five has broken it. The number itself matters less than the honesty of it — customers will accept a wait they were told about and resent one they weren’t. Set the expectation in the terms, then beat it if you can.

The broader point is that fulfilment deserves to be designed, not assumed. The channel, the timing, the verification, the unclaimed-prize path, and the records all sit downstream of decisions that are easiest to make before the campaign launches. Leave them to the end and you’re improvising at the exact moment the customer is paying closest attention.

If you’re planning a promotion and the payout side still reads as a single line in the brief, that’s usually the sign it’s worth pressure-testing. We’re happy to talk it through — it’s the part of the job we spend most of our time on.

Admin
In Analytics

Promotion Terms and Conditions in Australia: What to Include

The terms and conditions are usually the last thing written and the first thing that causes a problem. Creative is signed off, the microsite is built, the media is booked, and then someone realises the T&Cs need to be live before entries open. So they get pulled together in an afternoon, copied from the last campaign, and dropped into a link at the bottom of the entry form. Most of the time that’s fine. When it isn’t, it’s expensive, and the fix always lands after the promotion has started.

Terms and conditions aren’t the glamorous part of a promotion, but they’re the part that decides what happens when something goes wrong: a disputed winner, a prize that can’t be delivered, a regulator asking a question, a customer who read the offer differently to how you meant it. Getting them right isn’t about legal cover for its own sake. It’s about making sure the promotion you designed is the promotion you’re actually allowed to run.

What must promotion terms and conditions include in Australia?

At a minimum, promotion terms and conditions in Australia must identify the promoter, state who is eligible to enter and who is excluded, set the start and end dates and times, explain exactly how to enter, describe the prizes and their total value, and set out how and when winners are drawn, notified, and published. For games of chance above the relevant state thresholds, they must also carry the trade promotion permit numbers. These aren’t optional extras — they’re the clauses a regulator or a disgruntled entrant will look for first.

The detail underneath each of those is where campaigns come unstuck. “Who is eligible” sounds simple until you have to decide whether employees of the client’s distributors count, whether entrants need to be residents or just physically in Australia, and what the minimum age is for a prize that includes alcohol or travel. “How to enter” has to match the mechanic precisely — if the microsite lets someone enter twice but the terms say one entry per person, the terms are wrong, not the site. The receipt validation rules and any purchase requirement need to be spelled out in the same language the entry form uses. Small mismatches between what the terms say and what the platform does are the most common source of avoidable disputes we see.

The permit clauses that trip up national campaigns

Australia doesn’t have one set of promotion rules. It has eight, and a national campaign has to satisfy all of them at once. Most states have moved away from individual permits, but the ones that still require them are the ones that catch people out.

In New South Wales, an authority to conduct a trade promotion lottery is required once the total prize value exceeds $10,000, and that authority is granted for a period of one, three, or five years rather than per campaign. In the Australian Capital Territory, a permit is needed once the prize pool goes over $3,000. In South Australia, the threshold is $5,000 — and an instant win element requires a permit regardless of prize value. Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania don’t run permit systems for trade promotions.

The practical consequence is that your terms and conditions have to be written for the strictest applicable jurisdiction, not the easiest. If your prize pool clears the ACT and SA thresholds, the permit numbers for those jurisdictions have to appear in the terms, and a copy of the terms usually has to accompany the permit application itself — which means the terms need to be finalised before you apply, not after. This is the sequencing that derails launch dates: brands treat the permit as a formality to sort out later, then discover the regulator wants the finished terms weeks before entries were meant to open. If you’re unsure which thresholds apply, our state-by-state permit guide walks through each one.

Do promotion terms and conditions need to show a permit number?

Yes — where a permit or authority is required, the permit number must be publicly displayed, and the accepted place for it is the terms and conditions and the promotional advertising. If your promotion crosses the NSW, ACT or SA thresholds, leaving the number off the terms isn’t a formatting oversight; it’s running a regulated promotion without meeting the condition of the permit. The terms also generally have to be available at the point of entry, so an entrant can read them before they commit, not buried three clicks away after they’ve handed over their details.

Where terms and conditions actually get tested

Permits get the attention because they’re a hard requirement with a form to fill in. But the clause most likely to cause you grief isn’t a permit — it’s the gap between what the promotion promised and what the entrant thought it promised. That’s Australian Consumer Law territory, and it applies to every promotion in the country regardless of prize value or state.

The test the ACCC applies is the overall impression, not the fine print. If the headline says “win a car” and the terms quietly reveal it’s a two-year lease with conditions, the terms don’t rescue the headline — the misleading impression has already been created. Fine print can clarify an offer, but it can’t contradict it. This is where good terms earn their keep: they’re not there to walk back the promise, they’re there to make the promise precise enough that nobody can reasonably read it two ways. A well-drafted set of terms describes the actual prize, the actual odds context, and the actual conditions in plain language, so the advertised offer and the delivered offer are the same thing.

The other place terms get tested is at the finish line, when a winner can’t be contacted or a prize can’t be delivered as described. Your terms need to say what happens to an unclaimed prize, how long you’ll try to reach a winner, whether there’s a redraw, and what happens if a prize becomes unavailable and has to be substituted. These clauses feel remote when you’re writing them and very immediate when a major prize is sitting unclaimed. Deciding the rule in advance — in writing — is a great deal easier than improvising it under pressure with a regulator’s thresholds in mind.

What happens if promotion terms and conditions are misleading?

If terms and conditions are misleading or contradict the advertised offer, the promotion can breach the Australian Consumer Law, and the ACCC can pursue penalties for conduct that is misleading, deceptive or unconscionable. Beyond the legal exposure, a promotion that has to be corrected or pulled mid-flight does real damage to the brand running it — the fix is always public, and it always lands after entrants have already formed an impression. The cost of getting the terms right is a few hours of care up front; the cost of getting them wrong is paid in front of an audience.

Getting the terms to match the promotion

The through-line in all of this is that terms and conditions are a description of the campaign you actually built, checked against the rules that actually apply. They’re not boilerplate, and last year’s terms with the dates changed will quietly carry last year’s mistakes into this year’s campaign. The most reliable way to keep them honest is to write them alongside the mechanic rather than after it — so the entry rules, the permit thresholds, the prize description, and the winner process all agree with each other before anything goes live.

At Trevor Services this is part of how we set a campaign up rather than a step at the end: because the promotion runs on our platform, the terms can be checked against what the entry form and fulfilment process actually do, not what everyone assumes they do. It’s the least visible part of a promotion and one of the few parts that can stop the whole thing. If you’re pulling a campaign together and want the terms pressure-tested before they go live, we’re happy to talk it through.

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