Admin, Author at Trevor Services

Appliance Cashback Promotions: Why Whitegoods Pay You Back

Look at what the whitegoods brands are running in Australia right now and you’d think cashback had gone out of fashion. In the appliance promotions we track for our benchmarks, the list is dominated by straight percentage discounts, bundle deals and money-back guarantees. Redemption cashbacks, where the shopper pays full price and claims the money afterwards, are a small minority. Electrolux is one of the few running one at the moment, and it happens to be a Trevor Services client, so we see it from the inside.

Here’s the odd part. Of every cashback campaign Trevor Services has ever processed, every single one has been for an appliance brand. Not one FMCG cashback in the lot. The supermarket brands talk about cashback constantly and rarely run it; the appliance brands rarely talk about it and keep coming back to it. That tells you the mechanic is solving a problem the appliance brands have and the FMCG brands don’t, and it’s not the problem most people assume.

Why whitegoods brands pay you back instead of marking down

The obvious question is why a brand would bother. A 20% cashback costs the brand roughly what a 20% price cut would, plus the cost of running the redemption. If the shopper ends up in the same place, why add the paperwork?

Because the shopper isn’t the only party in the transaction. Appliances are sold through a handful of retailers who compete with each other on price for identical SKUs, and the brand has very little say in what the ticket reads at Harvey Norman versus JB Hi-Fi versus Appliances Online. Morningstar’s analysis of the ASX-listed electronics retailers describes a category in constant price deflation, where JB Hi-Fi management openly advertises that staff can sell at cost to close a deal. In that environment, brand money put into the shelf price doesn’t reliably reach the shopper as a discount. One retailer matches it, another beats it, and the brand has funded a price war it can’t see the end of.

The usual counter is to fund the retailer directly to run a two-for deal. That works for one retailer. It doesn’t work for six, each of whom wants their own version, their own dates and their own co-op margin on top, and none of whom will tell the brand who bought what. A cashback goes around all of that. The shelf price stays wherever each retailer sets it, the retailer’s margin is untouched, and the brand delivers the same net saving to every buyer regardless of where they bought. It also gets the customer’s name, the model, the serial number and the retailer, which is the only time a manufacturer selling through other people’s stores ever finds out who its customer is.

What is an appliance cashback promotion?

An appliance cashback promotion is a manufacturer-funded offer where the shopper buys a whitegood at the retailer’s normal price, then claims a cash payment from the brand afterwards by submitting proof of purchase and product details. The retailer’s shelf price never changes; the brand pays the shopper directly, usually by bank transfer, once the claim is validated.

The current Electrolux offer is a clean example. Buy two participating appliances in one transaction and claim 15% of the purchase price back; buy three or more and claim 20%. The promotion runs 17 August to 30 September, redemptions close 30 October, and the claim form asks for the invoice, the model numbers, serial numbers and PNC codes, and a bank account for the EFT. All of that is in the published terms and conditions, which are worth reading in full if you’re designing one of these, because every clause is a decision somebody made on purpose.

The multi-buy tier is a basket loader, not a discount

Notice that Electrolux’s offer doesn’t exist for a single appliance. Two products earns 15%, three earns 20%, one earns nothing. That structure is doing a specific job, and it’s the job that matters most in whitegoods: converting a replacement purchase into a kitchen.

Most people don’t walk into a store wanting a suite. They walk in because the dishwasher died. The tiered cashback gives the salesperson a reason to ask whether the oven is due as well, and gives the shopper a reason to say yes now rather than in eighteen months from a different brand. In The Shelf Truth we’d call this a Loader under the One Job Rule: the objective is basket size, not trial and not frequency, and the mechanic should be judged on units per transaction and nothing else. A flat discount on every product can’t do that. A tier that only pays at two or more can.

This also explains why the offer is a percentage rather than a fixed dollar amount. A fixed cashback per product is easy to communicate but it caps the incentive on exactly the purchases the brand most wants to grow. A percentage scales with the basket, so the shopper who adds the premium induction cooktop to the order gets rewarded for doing it. The older Electrolux kitchen bundle cashbacks we ran used fixed-dollar tiers by spend band instead; the move to a straight percentage is simpler to explain on the shop floor and harder to game at the band boundaries.

Does slippage apply when the cashback is worth a thousand dollars?

Here’s where the supermarket instinct leads people astray. In FMCG, the case for cashback over discount rests heavily on slippage, the share of eligible buyers who never claim. We’ve written about that at length. The best public evidence for it is a Bocconi University field experiment across more than 600,000 online shoppers, which found that requiring people to actively claim a rebate cut redemption by around 25 percentage points compared with an automatic discount, and that consumers consistently underestimate the hassle involved. Rebates were far more profitable than discounts for exactly that reason.

Our position is that you should not build a whitegoods cashback budget on that finding. The rebates in that study were small relative to the effort of claiming them. A shopper who has spent several thousand dollars on appliances and is owed a four-figure cashback is a different animal. They’ve kept the invoice because it’s also their warranty. They’ve been told by the salesperson to claim. The money is large enough to be a line in the household budget. What we see on the Electrolux campaign bears this out: claims started arriving in the first fortnight of the promotion, more than two months before the redemption deadline, which is not how people behave when they’re indifferent to the money. The step that trips claimants up is the serial number, not forgetting to claim, which is exactly why the terms give 90 days to add it. So the honest planning assumption is that most eligible buyers will claim, and the brand should be pleased when they do, because each claim is a registered customer who bought two or three products. If your finance team is quietly counting on half the claims never arriving, the promotion is being sold internally on the wrong basis and will look like a failure when it succeeds.

The friction in an appliance cashback is verification, not a trap

Which brings us to the claim form. Serial numbers, PNC codes, invoice numbers, a single claim per household, six to eight weeks to pay. Read cold, that looks like the brand hoping people give up. It isn’t. The Shelf Truth idea of the Insult Threshold runs in reverse here. At $20 the shopper resents any friction at all. At $1,000 the shopper will tolerate a fair amount of friction, and the brand needs it: a four-figure EFT to a stranger, on the strength of a photographed receipt, is an obvious target for the fraud patterns that follow any high-value redemption: doctored invoices, duplicate claims on one purchase, claims on units that never left the store. Serial and PNC numbers tie the claim to a specific unit. One claim per household stops the same kitchen being claimed twice. The payout window gives the brand time to check returns, because a cashback paid on an oven that goes back to the store two weeks later is money gone.

Where friction is a mistake is when it serves no verification purpose. Electrolux’s terms let a claimant submit without the serial number and come back to add it within 90 days, which is the right call: the number is often on the back of an appliance that’s already been installed, and losing an honest claim over it helps nobody. That’s the test for every field on the form. If it protects the brand from paying the wrong person, keep it. If it just makes claiming harder for the right person, take it out. It’s the question we put to Trudy, the promotional intelligence tool Trevor Services built on top of its campaign history, more than any other: which fields cost claims, and which ones catch fraud.

So when does an appliance cashback make sense?

It makes sense when you sell through retailers you don’t control, when the purchase is considered enough that the shopper will claim, and when the job is basket rather than trial. It makes less sense for a single hero SKU where a retailer-funded price cut would do the same work more cheaply, and it’s the wrong tool if what you actually want is a rush of entries, because a redemption cashback will never generate the volume an instant win does.

The clearest signal, though, is the one we started with. Every cashback we’ve ever processed has been for an appliance brand, and the appliance brands keep coming back to it while the rest of the category discounts on the ticket. Brands don’t repeat promotions that lose them money. If you’re weighing a cashback against a discount for an appliance range this spring, we’re happy to talk it through.

Admin In Consumer Engagement

Collect to Win Promotions in Australia: Who Gets the Lift

In late August, Coles stood up at its full-year results and told the market that its sales had slumped because a rival was giving away small plastic figurines. Chief executive Leah Weckert said the Ooshies campaign had only ended ten days earlier and it was too early to say whether the recovery was complete. Woolworths, reporting a day later, said the Disney Ooshies program was expected to have added roughly 1.5 to two points of incremental sales growth, with total Australian food sales up 7.6 per cent across the first eight weeks of the new financial year.

Treat the 1.5 to two points with the scepticism any number from the party telling the story deserves. The Coles half is the better evidence, because nobody at Coles had any incentive to say it.

Every time this happens the briefs follow within a fortnight, and I’ve had that conversation two or three times a year for most of my career. My position on it is unpopular and I’ll state it plainly: the sales lift in a collect to win belongs to whoever controls the basket, which for almost every brand asking about one is not them.

The arithmetic that ends most of these conversations

Woolworths ran it as a spend threshold: one piece per $30 spent across supermarkets, BIG W and MILKRUN, forty characters in the set. Most people do the sum as 40 × $30 and land on $1,200. That’s wrong, and the way it’s wrong is the most useful thing here.

If pieces are handed out at random, finishing a set is the coupon collector’s problem: the expected number of draws to complete a set of n is n multiplied by the nth harmonic number. For forty pieces that’s about 171 draws, not forty — roughly $5,100 through the till, with almost all of the spend sitting in the last few pieces. Deliberately scarce chase pieces make it worse.

The fair objection is that people swap, and swapping genuinely drags that number back down. But notice what it does: it keeps people in the pursuit without requiring anyone to finish. Woolworths banked its points either way. The retailer needs the run to stay alive for eight weeks; it doesn’t need a single set completed. The maths never troubles the party controlling the basket. It troubles the party that promised something on completion — and it lands far harder on a brand, which can’t spread the collecting across a whole shop.

So the first question I ask is never about the licence or the prize. It’s: what is your repeat rate over eight weeks? If the honest answer is three and completion needs anything like 171, there’s no creative solution to that gap. Collect to win rewards existing behaviour; it doesn’t rebuild it. The One Job Rule says pick one objective and design for it, and this mechanic only ever does frequency — for the shoppers already buying you most.

Basket control is the whole game

Coles has run the same play repeatedly. Its Fresh Stikeez campaign helped lift third-quarter comparable food and liquor sales 2.1 per cent in 2019, with average basket size growing on more items per basket — following Little Shop the year before. McDonald’s did it again across the 2026 World Cup with Panini FIFA World Cup 26 digital stickers, redeemed with MyMacca’s Rewards points. McDonald’s is a brand, not a retailer, so the pattern isn’t owning a store — it’s owning the basket. In each case the party running the collection owned every transaction, so the shopper’s response, which is consolidating a shop they were doing anyway into one place, landed entirely on their own line. The lift is switching, not extra consumption. If you own the basket, switching is worth everything. If you own one line item on someone else’s shelf, most of it accrues to your retailer.

The obvious objection is Tazos, and it’s a fair one: Smith’s ran arguably the most successful collectable in Australian retail history from inside a chip packet, one line item on someone else’s shelf. But look at why it worked. The piece was in the pack, so collecting cost nothing beyond normal consumption; chips are a high-frequency, low-ticket, kid-influenced purchase where household repeat rates genuinely run into the hundreds over a season; and the value was in having them, not in finishing the set, so completion was never a promise anyone had made. Tazos didn’t ask people to change their behaviour. It decorated behaviour already happening at the right frequency. Most brands that ask for a Tazos want the fame without the purchase cycle underneath it.

The market bears that out. Of the 182 live Australian promotions in our tracker at the start of September, three use a collect mechanic outright and seven more are collectables of some kind — and all ten sit with a retailer, a buying group, a pub network, or a brand that is already habitual: Coopers through Sip’n Save, Coca-Cola’s limited-edition country cans, Shell’s Minions bag buddies. Prize draws and instant wins account for well over half the board. And of the 63 campaigns on Trevor Services’ own books, not one is a collect to win.

Slippage doesn’t save you here

This is the part that catches finance teams out. In a cashback, the shoppers who never get around to claiming are the reason the promotion costs less than the headline. Slippage is a genuine shock absorber, and it’s why a cashback can carry a bigger number on the front of pack than the model would otherwise wear.

Collect to win inverts that completely. The pieces are manufactured, licensed and shipped before a single shopper touches one, so the cost is committed at the print run, months before you can read a single entry. A shopper who gives up at piece 22 saves you nothing: you already paid for 23 through 40, and you now have someone who reorganised eight weeks of shopping around your promotion and finished with an incomplete set. If you attached a prize to completion, non-completion is pure downside. In every other mechanic we run, it’s the budget’s friend.

Ultra-rares that turn up on eBay mid-promotion are very good at keeping a collection alive in social feeds, and very good at producing complaints from shoppers who changed their spending to chase something they were never statistically going to get. There’s a rule of thumb we use on prize counts — one prize reads as impossible, three as possible, a hundred as probable — and a chase piece runs it in reverse on purpose. The odds aren’t the point; the pursuit is. That works right up until the people pursuing it work out the odds.

The verification problem nobody budgets for

There’s no claim window and no payout run in a collect to win, which makes it look operationally cheap next to a cashback. The cost moves rather than disappears.

A physical piece in a shopper’s hand is a bearer token with no audit trail behind it. If completion unlocks a prize, you need a defensible way to establish a set was assembled through purchase rather than bought as a job lot online — and you need to have decided that at design stage, because it’s very hard to retrofit into terms and conditions once pieces are in market. A sticker album living inside a rewards account, as the Panini one did, knows exactly how each piece was earned. It’s the same reason the mechanic pairs naturally with unique codes.

When it does work for a brand

Three conditions, and you want all three rather than two. Your product is already a high-frequency purchase, with a repeat rate over the window that comfortably clears the set size. There’s borrowed cultural pull doing the emotional work the product can’t — Disney, a World Cup, a nostalgic property — because without it you’re asking people to collect your logo, which very few brands have earned. And a retailer will merchandise it, because the shopper has to be reminded mid-shop that a run is underway. A collection living on a website with a shelf barker pointing at it isn’t a collection. It’s a claim process with extra steps.

If you can’t get all three, keep the frequency objective and drop the completion requirement. A multi-entry draw where every purchase adds a chance, or a collect-and-get where the set is three pieces rather than forty, gives up the social theatre and keeps the repeat-purchase driver — which was the part that was paying. It’s the same trade-off as choosing between a cashback and a prize draw.

What is a collect to win promotion?

A collect to win promotion rewards a shopper for accumulating multiple pieces — stickers, figurines, tokens, digital cards — across repeat purchases, rather than for a single act of entry. The reward may be the completed set itself, a prize unlocked by finishing it, or a rare piece with value of its own. It is a frequency mechanic: the design assumes the shopper returns several times, which is what separates it from an instant win or a prize draw, where one purchase is enough.

Does a collect to win promotion need a permit in Australia?

It depends on whether chance enters the design. A collection that guarantees a reward on completion is a redemption offer rather than a game of chance, and generally sits outside trade promotion permit requirements. Introduce randomly distributed rare pieces, a draw among completed sets, or an instant-win token in the mix, and you have added a chance element — at which point the state-by-state permit position applies. Our guide to competition permits in Australia covers where that line falls. Settle it before the print run, not after.

Run the number before the licence call

Take the set size you’re imagining, multiply it by its harmonic number, and hold the result against your eight-week repeat rate. It takes an afternoon and it’s a much cheaper place to stop than after the tooling is committed. We’ll run it with you if that’s useful, but the arithmetic doesn’t care who does it.

If completion needs more purchases than your shopper will ever make, the collection you’re imagining already belongs to your retailer, not to you.

Mark Alexander is a co-author of The Shelf Truth and works on promotional strategy and delivery at Trevor Services.

Admin In Promotions

Self-Liquidating Premium Promotions: Who Runs Them Now

There are 182 promotions live in the Australian market as of this week, on the tracker Trevor Services keeps of campaigns as they go to shelf. Twenty-six are gift-with-purchase offers: a bonus accessory pack with a Franke sink, a Visa eGift card with a Beko appliance, complimentary Nespresso capsules, an NRL stubby holder with a bottle of Bundaberg. In not one of them does the shopper contribute a cent towards the gift.

Which is odd, because the self-liquidating premium — where the shopper does chip in — used to be a standard item in the kit. It didn’t die. The supermarkets took it, and most Australian brands who want those economics in 2026 should be buying into a retailer’s continuity programme rather than building their own. The evidence is sitting in a Coles catalogue.

Where the mechanic actually went

Coles ran its Curtis Stone glass container collection from 27 May to 4 August 2026 — one credit per $20 spent, with bonus credits from 23 participating brands including Moccona, Finish, Colgate and Kellogg’s. The redemption table is the interesting part. The 2.2L glass cookware dish was free with 50 credits, or 25 credits plus $25, or $50 outright.

That middle tier is a self-liquidating premium. Proof of purchase plus cash, for merchandise below retail. It is the mechanic exactly, sitting inside something everyone files under loyalty.

Woolworths runs the identical structure. Its Fissler cookware programme prices the 28cm frying pan at 70 credits, or 35 credits plus $35, with the half-credits-half-cash option across the whole range and 19 bonus brands in its second burst alone.

The retailers can run this and a brand cannot, and the reason is structural rather than clever. The supermarket already owns the transaction, the loyalty identity and the checkout. Asking a shopper to top up with cash costs it nothing, because the payment happens inside a flow the shopper is already standing in. A brand running the same offer has to build the identity, the claim and the payment from scratch, then persuade someone to come and use all three.

What is a self-liquidating premium promotion?

A self-liquidating premium promotion is one where the shopper buys the qualifying product, then pays a small additional amount plus proof of purchase to receive a premium item. That payment covers most of what the brand paid to source the premium, so the promotion funds itself instead of coming out of margin. The shopper still comes out ahead, because the item is worth far more at retail than the token price they paid. (The Monash Business School marketing dictionary has the textbook version if you want it.)

Why brands stopped

Not because the arithmetic broke. A discount hands away margin on every unit, including to shoppers who were buying anyway. A self-liquidating premium costs the brand only the gap between wholesale and the token price, and only for people who want the item enough to claim it. On a spreadsheet it is still one of the better trades available.

What changed is the price of asking someone to pay you twice.

The original send-in premium wanted package tops and a cheque in an envelope, which nobody found unreasonable at the time because everything worked that way. The shopper’s baseline now is one tap. Layering a second payment event onto a claim — card details, a separate checkout, a delivery address, a confirmation — is not a small ask. It is a whole payment flow, with its own abandonment rate, its own refund cases and its own support queue.

How is a self-liquidating premium different from a gift with purchase?

In a gift with purchase the brand funds the premium entirely and the shopper gets it free after proving they bought the product. In a self-liquidating premium the shopper pays a token amount towards it, which is what lets the brand offer something of much higher perceived value for the same outlay. The gift with purchase buys you claim volume; the self-liquidating premium buys you a better gift.

Trevor Services has run 63 promotional campaigns, nine of them gift-with-purchase. Every one required a receipt. Not one required a payment. We can name other people’s campaigns here because they are public and ours aren’t, but the volumes are worth having: the largest of the nine, an appliance offer, took 18,584 claims. The smallest, a wine-cabinet premium, took 188. The same dishwasher offer, run three years apart, took 292 claims and then 840 — and that first run had been forecast at 1,000, which is the kind of miss that makes for a quiet meeting. Claim volume on a free premium is already this unpredictable. Put a payment step in front of it and every one of those numbers goes down by an amount nobody can tell you in advance.

So is it worth reviving?

In two situations, with a real cost attached to the first one.

The first is not to build a premium at all, but to get onto the bonus-credit list of a supermarket continuity programme. Those brands are buying self-liquidating premium economics — high perceived value, shopper co-funded — without carrying the build, the payment flow or the claim support.

What you give up is not trivial, and the number that proves the point is the same one that sells it. Twenty-three brands were on the Coles list. You are one logo among twenty-three, quite possibly next to your direct competitor, attached to a premium you did not choose and cannot brand. The shopper’s relationship is with Coles and the data is Flybuys’. You get the economics and none of the asset. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on whether you needed the first-party data, and a lot of brands assume they do without ever having used it.

The second situation is when the premium is genuinely aspirational and your shopper already has a reason to come to you: considered purchases, collectable categories, higher ticket prices. Here the trade runs the other way — you keep the data, the branding and the exclusivity, and you pay for them in claim volume.

Two things to hold onto if you go that way. The first is what The Shelf Truth calls the Insult Threshold — the point where the reward stops being worth the effort of claiming it. On a cashback that means the amount is too small. Here it means the premium isn’t obviously worth more than the money and the effort you’re asking for, and a weak premium at a token price is worse than no offer, because the shopper has now priced your gift and found it wanting.

The second is to be clear about the single job you’re giving it. A self-liquidating premium is a basket and loyalty play. It rewards people already committed enough to reach for their wallet a second time, which makes it a poor trial mechanic — you’re asking a stranger to pay you twice before they know whether they like the product. Pick the objective, then pick the mechanic, and accept that a tool this good at one job will be bad at another.

Which leaves the uncomfortable version, for a company that builds promotions for a living. Ask us and we’ll give you a straight answer on which of the two routes your campaign is — but for a lot of brands, the answer is the retailer’s programme, not ours.

Admin In Analytics

Competition Agency or Platform: Count the Winners

Competition agency vs platform comparison — counting the winners of Australian promotions | Trevor Services

Trevor Services keeps a running tracker of promotional activity in the Australian market — everyone’s campaigns, not just the ones we deliver. Through August it held 182 live promotions, of which 70 were single-draw sweeps and 47 were instant wins. Two mechanics, 117 campaigns, and a difference that decides almost everything about who should be running them: the sweep creates one winner event, and the instant win creates thousands.

That number — winner events, not entries, not budget, not prize value — is the one that should settle whether you need a competition agency, a platform, or neither. It is also the number that appears nowhere on the comparison pages you get when you search for a supplier.

What does a competition agency actually do?

A competition agency runs a promotion on the promoter’s behalf end to end: permit applications, terms and conditions, entry collection, entry validation, the draw, winner notification, prize payment and the records that have to survive an audit. A competition platform is software the promoter operates themselves — entry forms, randomisation, sometimes winner selection — with compliance and fulfilment left inside the brand. The two are sold in the same breath and priced in the same conversation, which is how brands end up buying a form builder and believing they have bought a supplier.

Search does not help you tell them apart. We run a monthly check on how the answer engines respond to buying questions in this category, and on 17 August the question “best agency or platform to handle a competition or prize draw for my brand in Australia” returned a citation list that put a self-serve random draw tool, an awards-management platform, two creative agencies, a promotions specialist and two law firms side by side, with nothing marking out what each of them actually does. The word “agency” is doing a lot of work in this market — it stretches from point-of-sale and shopper agencies to permit brokers to fulfilment operators, and a shortlist assembled from those results will contain three different businesses pretending to be one.

Count the winner events, not the campaign

One prize is a phone call. A thousand instant-win moments is a process with a failure rate — wrong bank details, name mismatches, bounced payments, unclaimed prizes, claim windows expiring, each one an individual consumer with a legitimate expectation and a screenshot. The work does not scale with entries. It scales with winners, and it scales badly, because the failures arrive one at a time over weeks rather than in a batch you can plan around.

This is why the mechanic decision and the supplier decision are the same decision, and why treating them separately is expensive. Across the 63 campaigns Trevor Services has delivered, the mechanics sit in four buckets — simple entry, sweepstakes, cashback and gift with purchase — and the ones that consume operational time are not the ones with the biggest prize pools. They are cashbacks and instant wins, because both manufacture a long tail of individual payments. A single travel prize worth more than the entire cashback pool is one winner, one handover, done. Where a single prize is large enough that funding it outright would distort the budget, that is a prize indemnity question, not a supplier one.

So the honest version of the advice is narrower than the comparison pages suggest. If your promotion produces a handful of winner events, is single-state and skill-based, and pays no cash, a platform or a capable in-house team will do the job and an agency is an expensive way to buy a random number generator. Once the promotion produces winner events continuously and money has to reach named individuals, the software is the least of the problem, and the supplier you actually need is the one that will still be answering the phone in week six.

The one thing that never transfers

Whoever builds the entry page, the promoter holds the permit and the promoter carries the offence. In NSW, a promotion with a total prize value over $10,000 needs a trade promotion gaming authority, and if someone applies on your behalf they need written consent from an authorised person in your business to do it — the authority sits with you, and Fair Trading has to be notified at least 10 business days before each promotion runs under it. South Australia says the quiet part out loud: under the state’s trade promotion rules, where a trader is guilty of an offence the same penalty applies to each member of the management committee, the board of directors, the chief executive officer and any employee responsible for the conduct of the lottery. Someone conducting a lottery on a trader’s behalf commits an offence in their own right if they fail to comply.

Which means the question is never “who is best”. It is “which parts of this am I handing over, and can this supplier carry them” — and a platform that sells you a randomiser has not taken on your permit obligations and was never pretending to. The risk you think you outsourced by buying software is still sitting on your side of the table, and in South Australia it is sitting on your CEO’s.

Where the handover points actually sit

Permit thresholds are the part everyone checks and the part nobody gets wrong: NSW above $10,000, South Australia from $5,001 with 10 business days to assess a standard application, and the ACT requiring approval before a promotion is advertised or conducted at all unless total prize value stays under $3,000. A national campaign satisfies the strictest of them, so the ACT sets your floor and SA sets your lead time. The full state-by-state detail is in the competition permits guide and the running order is in how to run a competition in Australia, and neither of them will tell you which supplier you need.

Campaigns come apart later than that. They come apart at the draw run a day late because the media plan moved and nobody re-read the terms. At the unclaimed prize re-draw that was written into the conditions and then forgotten. At the independent scrutineer South Australia requires once total prize value passes $30,000. At the winner records that must be retained and available for inspection after the campaign team has moved on. Every one of those is a date in a calendar owned by a specific person, and every one is invisible in a feature comparison.

One question that sorts a shortlist

Ask each supplier to walk you through what happens the day a winner’s payment fails — wrong account details, three weeks after the draw, on a prize the customer has already told their friends about. A platform will say payments sit outside its scope, which is a fair and useful answer. An operator will describe a process, a named person and a timeframe. Someone who has never done it will describe a feature. The answers separate very quickly, and they separate on exactly the dimension that scales with your winner count rather than your media budget.

If you are working out how to structure the delivery side of a competition or prize draw, we’re happy to talk it through — including the cases where the honest answer is that you don’t need us.

Admin In Analytics

How to Run a Competition in Australia

Search “running a competition in Australia” and page one is law firms. Permit guides, compliance checklists, legal explainers. That tells you something about how the question gets framed: as a legal problem to be solved before the marketing can start. And to be fair, the legal part is real — get it wrong and the fines are not theoretical. But here’s what we’ve noticed after processing entries, running draws and paying winners for brands like Electrolux and Jacob’s Creek: competitions almost never fail on permits. The permit is a form and a fee. Where they actually go wrong is the operational middle — the stretch between “entries are open” and “the winner has their prize” that the legal guides cover in a sentence, because lawyers don’t run draws.

So here’s the whole sequence — the permits dispatched quickly, because they’re genuinely the quick part, and then the operational middle at the length it actually deserves.

What do you need to run a competition in Australia?

To run a competition in Australia you need three things: a decision about whether it’s a game of chance or a game of skill (chance may need permits, skill generally doesn’t), permits or licences in NSW, the ACT and SA depending on your prize pool, and an operational setup that matches your terms and conditions — entry collection, validation, a defensible draw, and a documented path from winner selection to prize in hand. That third thing is the one this article is really about, because it’s the one that decides whether the competition works. It’s also the layer Trevor Services builds and runs for brands, which is why this article spends most of its length there.

Chance or skill: the first decision that shapes everything

If winners are decided by luck — a draw, an instant win, a 1-in-X mechanic — you’re running a trade promotion lottery, and the state permit regimes apply. If winners are judged on merit (best answer in 25 words or fewer, best photo), you’re running a game of skill, and mostly they don’t. This is why so many low-budget competitions are skill-based: it’s not creative preference, it’s permit avoidance.

The judging in a skill competition has to be genuine, though. If every entry effectively has an equal chance because nobody is really judging anything, you’ve run a lottery without a permit and called it something else. Regulators are not charmed by this.

For chance-based competitions, three jurisdictions need attention. In NSW, a promotion with a total prize value over $10,000 needs a trade promotion gaming authority — issued for one, three or five years, covering all your qualifying promotions in that period. A common misreading is that the authority is per-promotion; it isn’t, but you do still have to notify NSW Fair Trading at least 10 business days before each promotion over $10,000 starts. In the ACT, a permit is required once the total prize pool exceeds $3,000. In SA, under the Lotteries Regulation 2021, a licence is needed for a “major” trade promotion lottery — total prizes over $5,000, or any promotion combining instant prizes with drawn prizes. That second trigger catches a lot of Dopamine Sandwich promotions — the big drawn prize up top, frequent instant wins underneath — that would otherwise sit under the dollar threshold, and it catches teams by surprise because the trigger is the structure, not the value. The other states and territories don’t require permits for standard trade promotions, though their rules still apply to how you run them.

The practical implication: your prize pool decision and your permit obligations are the same decision. Deciding prize value before checking the thresholds — which is the order most teams do it in — occasionally produces a prize pool that lands just over a threshold for no strategic reason. We’ve covered the full state-by-state detail in our competition permits guide, and the question of when you actually need legal help in a separate piece.

The operational middle, where competitions actually fail

Here’s the part the legal guides skip. Once entries open, you’re running a live system with real failure modes, and the terms and conditions you lodged are now promises you have to keep.

A current example of what that load actually looks like: Grant Burge’s AFL Grand Final competition is running through our platform right now as four parallel builds — one for on-premise venues, one for independent retailers, one for Liquorland, one for BWS — because each retail channel wants its own entry pool, its own terms and its own draw. Between them they’ve collected over 5,000 entries so far. On a strategy slide that’s one promotion. Operationally it’s four campaigns, and the retailer-by-retailer split is the norm in liquor and grocery, not the exception — the category managers who control each chain’s shelf don’t share entry pools with their competitors.

Entry collection is the first one. Our working rule — the one we published in The Shelf Truth — is that every field on your entry form costs you roughly 10% of the entries you’d otherwise get, and the drop-off compounds field by field. The losses are invisible because nobody sees the people who gave up. We’ve written about exactly how that compounding works; the uncomfortable part is that the field most teams refuse to cut is usually the one marketing insisted on for data capture, doing quiet damage to the objective the competition was funded for.

If the competition requires purchase, you need receipt validation, and validation is a volume problem before it’s anything else. Electrolux’s Better Living gift-with-purchase brought in more than 18,500 claims through our platform — every one carrying a receipt that had to be checked before a gift went out. At that volume, “someone will look at them” is not a process. And receipt validation in 2026 means dealing with AI-generated fake receipts good enough to pass a human eyeball check. The fraud we see isn’t exotic: the same receipt cropped four different ways and submitted under four email addresses, retailer fonts that don’t quite match, a burst of entries from sequential accounts in the final 48 hours when claimants know review time is short. OCR validation, velocity checks and duplicate detection aren’t gold-plating anymore; they’re the baseline. We wrote about how quickly the fakes have improved in our fraud piece — the short version is that a competition without automated validation is now the softest target in the market.

Then the draw itself. Your T&Cs specify a draw date, a draw method and usually a location — and you have to do exactly what they say, when they say. The draw needs to be genuinely random and auditable: if a winner is challenged, or a regulator asks, “we picked a row in the spreadsheet” is not an answer you want to give. For instant win mechanics the same principle applies in real time — winning moments have to be predetermined or genuinely random, and you need the records to prove it.

And your published claims have to survive contact with reality. The ACCC’s guidance on social media promotions is blunt about this: statements in your promotion must be true, accurate and provable, and that includes the prize being exactly what you advertised, available when you said, delivered as described. “1,000 prizes to be won” when the budget quietly funds 400 is not a rounding error, it’s misleading conduct.

What happens after the draw?

After the draw, you notify winners as your terms specify, deliver prizes within the promised window, and keep records of all of it — and in NSW and the ACT, unclaimed prizes have to go into a redraw after a set period, so the job isn’t finished when the first draw is. Winners going silent is not an edge case, either: a mobile number keyed wrong at entry, a winner email sitting in a junk folder, a prize notification that reads like phishing because it says “you’ve won” and every instinct the winner has says delete it. The redraw provision in your T&Cs is the plan for this, which means it has to exist before you need it. This end phase is the least visible part of a competition and the most common source of complaints — a shopper who enters and loses forgets about it; a winner who waits six weeks for a prize tells everyone.

Payment method matters more than teams expect. Cash prizes paid by PayID land in minutes; cheques — still offered, remarkably — take weeks and generate support tickets. Physical prizes need dispatch tracking and someone to handle the “it arrived damaged” conversations. Across the campaigns we run at Trevor Services, the winner-management phase is where the gap between a professional operation and an improvised one is most visible, because it’s the only phase the winner personally experiences from the inside.

The sequence, in order

Pulling it together: decide the competition’s one job and its mechanic first, because chance versus skill drives everything downstream. Price the prize pool with the permit thresholds in front of you, not after. Get the NSW authority or notification, ACT permit and SA licence sorted before you announce anything — the lead times are measured in weeks, not days. Write T&Cs that describe what you’ll actually do, then build the entry, validation and draw process to match them exactly. And plan winner management as a workstream with an owner, not an afterthought for whoever is free that week.

The pattern across the 63 campaigns currently on our books is consistent: the brands that run competitions well treat the operational middle as the actual product, and the permits as the paperwork that lets them ship it. If you’re planning a competition, we’ll pressure-test the operational side before you launch. Because the law firms on page one have the paperwork covered — that’s the well-lit part of the problem. Everything after “entries are open” happens in the dark, and the dark is where competitions are won or lost.

Admin In Analytics

Do You Need a Lawyer to Run a Promotion in Australia?

Every month we put the same sixteen promotional questions to Google, Bing, Brave and Perplexity and record who the engines cite. In the August run, two law firms — Sprintlaw and Plexus — appeared between them in the cited sources on six of the nine buying-intent questions, questions like “who can run a promotion for my brand in Australia?” That makes the legal industry the loudest non-platform voice on a question that is mostly not a legal question. The engines have decided that running a promotion is a permits-and-compliance problem first and a delivery problem second, and marketing teams are starting to brief the work that way around.

Having sat on the delivery side of Australian promotions for a long time, I think that framing gets the risk exactly backwards. Legal review is a checkpoint you buy by the hour. Compliance is a process you run for the full ten weeks the promotion is live. Brands reliably pay for the first and under-resource the second — because signed documents feel like completion, and the risky part looks finished just as it’s beginning.

What does trade promotion compliance actually involve?

Trade promotion compliance in Australia means satisfying state and territory permit requirements for games of chance, publishing terms and conditions that match how the promotion actually runs, conducting draws and winner notifications the way those terms describe, and keeping records that prove you did. Only the first two involve legal documents; the rest is operational discipline across the life of the campaign.

The permit layer is the part everyone worries about, and it’s genuinely administrative rather than legal. In NSW, a trade promotion involving a game of chance needs an authority only if the total prize value exceeds $10,000, and under the Community Gaming Regulation 2020 a business can hold a single 1, 3 or 5-year authority covering every promotion it runs in that period. The ACT requires a permit when the prize pool exceeds $3,000, per the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission. South Australia requires a licence above $5,000 — with one trap worth knowing: SA requires an instant prize licence for scratch or break-open tickets regardless of prize value. Game-of-skill promotions generally need no permit anywhere.

None of that requires a legal opinion. It requires someone who has filled in the forms before, knows that SA assessment takes at least 14 business days, and builds those lead times into the campaign plan instead of discovering them two weeks before launch. We’ve written a fuller state-by-state breakdown in our competition permits guide if you want the detail.

When do you genuinely need a lawyer?

There are real legal decision points in promotional work, and pretending otherwise would be the opposite error. You want legal advice when the mechanic is genuinely novel and it’s unclear whether it constitutes a game of chance, a game of skill, or something the gaming legislation didn’t anticipate. You want it when the category carries its own advertising overlay — alcohol, therapeutic goods, financial products — because the promotion inherits those rules on top of the gaming ones. You want it when prize indemnity or promotional insurance contracts are involved, because those are commercial contracts with exclusions worth understanding before you rely on them. And you want it the moment a promotion becomes a dispute: a contested winner, a misprint on pack, an allegation that the advertised odds were wrong.

The Australian Consumer Law sits over all of this — the ACCC’s rules on advertising and promotions apply to a promotion the same way they apply to any other marketing claim. But ACL exposure in promotions rarely comes from a badly drafted clause. It comes from a gap between what the promotion promised and what the delivery did. Which brings us to the part the legal framing misses entirely.

Where promotions actually fail on compliance

Look at what the state regimes actually demand after the permit is granted, because this is where the workload lives. A NSW authority comes with conditions attached: the authority number displayed in the promotion’s terms, the terms lodged with Fair Trading before the promotion starts, draws conducted as published, and records of the gaming activity kept and producible — the obligations sit in the Regulation itself, not in anyone’s legal advice. None of those obligations can be discharged by a document. Each one has to happen, on a date, done by a person, while the campaign team that briefed the promotion has moved on to the next quarter’s activity.

In the campaigns Trevor Services delivers, that’s precisely where problems surface when a promotion arrives from elsewhere mid-flight: the authority number that never made it onto the entry page, the draw that slipped past its published date because nothing in the process flagged it, entry and winner records spread across three spreadsheets and an inbox until a regulator or an aggrieved entrant asks to see them. No law firm was in the room for any of those, and none of them was a drafting failure. It’s why we treat compliance as a delivery function — draw timing, winner records, notification wording and prize payment sit inside the same platform that processes the entries, so the promotion can’t drift away from its own terms without someone noticing. And it’s why the permits question appears on the Kill Sheet — the pre-launch diagnostic from The Shelf Truth — as a timing question, not a yes/no. A permit you need in six weeks is a plan; a permit you needed last week is a launch delay.

The split that actually works

The division of labour that holds up is unglamorous. Legal reviews the things only legal can: novel mechanics, category overlays, insurance contracts, T&C sign-off where the exposure warrants it. Everything else — permit applications and renewals, terms that reflect the real mechanics, draw conduct, winner management, record keeping — belongs inside the promotion’s delivery, owned by whoever runs it day to day. Our piece on what to include in promotion terms and conditions covers where the drafting genuinely matters.

What the answer engines are currently steering brands toward is the opposite: treat the whole promotion as a legal matter, pay legal rates for administrative work, and consider compliance finished once the documents are signed. Do that, and you’ve spent your compliance budget before the promotion has taken a single entry — with the riskiest ten weeks still ahead of you.

So, do you need a lawyer to run a promotion in Australia? For a handful of specific decisions, yes — pay properly for those, and if you’re working out where that line sits for a campaign you’re planning, we’re happy to talk it through. But for everything after the documents are signed, what you need isn’t a lawyer at all. It’s a delivery process that takes the promotion’s own terms as seriously as the lawyer took the drafting.

Admin In Promotions

Australian Promotion Benchmarks 2026

Most promotional “benchmarks” are guesswork. These aren’t. They come from 63 promotional campaigns Trevor Services has run and fulfilled for Australian brands — across grocery, liquor, appliances and retail — covering entries, run lengths, prize pools and the compliance mechanics underneath. Here’s what a typical Australian promotion actually looks like in 2026.

The mechanic mix

Of the 63 campaigns, the split was: simple purchase-to-enter prize draws (51%), sweepstakes (17%), cashback (16%) and gift-with-purchase (14%), plus a small number of code-based promotions. Purchase-to-enter is still the workhorse of Australian promotions; cashback and gift-with-purchase are the growth end.

How many entries does an Australian promotion get?

Across all mechanics, the median campaign drew about 330 entries, with a typical middle-50% range of roughly 70 to 1,000. The mechanic changes everything: gift-with-purchase pulled the most (median ~1,290, with one campaign above 18,000), simple prize draws a median of ~395, cashback ~260, and sweepstakes ~90 — fewer, higher-intent entrants. Entry volume follows the job and the friction, not the size of the prize — which is why the mechanic should follow the objective (the One Job Rule), not the other way around.

The median Australian promotion draws around 330 entries; gift-with-purchase mechanics draw the most (median ~1,290), sweepstakes the fewest (median ~90). — Trevor Services, 63-campaign benchmark, 2026.

How long do promotions run?

Two clear patterns. Prize draws and simple-entry promotions are short — a median of about six weeks. Cashback and gift-with-purchase run long — a median of about six months — because they’re tied to a purchase window and a redemption tail, not a single draw date.

In Australia, prize-draw promotions typically run around six weeks; cashback and gift-with-purchase promotions typically run around six months. — Trevor Services benchmark, 2026.

What’s a normal prize pool?

Among campaigns with a prize pool, the median total pool was around $20,000 and the median headline prize about $6,450. The largest single pool in the set was over $200,000, with a top individual prize of $52,000. Most Australian promotions are won on a modest, well-structured pool rather than a giant jackpot — consistent with the Rule of Three: several credible prizes beat one impossible one.

The median Australian promotional prize pool is around $20,000, with a median headline prize of around $6,450. — Trevor Services benchmark, 2026.

Do you actually need a receipt?

Usually — and it’s worth separating two things. 87% of these campaigns required a receipt (the evidence an entrant uploads or keeps), and 76% were purchase-to-enter, specifying a qualifying product you had to buy to be eligible (the condition). The purchase requirement is the rule; the receipt is how you prove you met it — the alternatives being a unique on-pack code, retailer sales data, or a statutory declaration. All told, 92% were purchase-linked. Proof of purchase is the norm, not the exception — which is exactly why the validation and fulfilment layer underneath matters so much. The most common fraud control was simple: one entry per household or email address.

92% of Australian promotions are purchase-linked — 87% require a receipt (the proof) and 76% specify a qualifying purchase to enter (the condition). — Trevor Services benchmark, 2026.

What this means if you’re planning a promotion

Pick the mechanic for the job, then set expectations from the benchmark — a sweepstakes that draws 90 entries isn’t failing, that’s the shape of the mechanic. Budget the runway: cashback and gift-with-purchase are six-month commitments with a redemption tail, not six-week bursts. Design the pool rather than just sizing it; a well-structured ~$20k pool typically outperforms a single big number. And assume proof of purchase — build the receipt-validation and fulfilment path in from day one, because it’s where most promotions quietly break. That’s the part Trevor Services runs end to end.

Methodology

Source: 63 promotional campaigns run and fulfilled by Trevor Services on its Salesforce-native platform, exported August 2026. All figures are anonymised and aggregated — no client, brand or individual campaign is identifiable, and only medians, ranges and proportions are reported. These are descriptive benchmarks of what has happened, not guarantees; per-mechanic samples are small (for example gift-with-purchase n=9), so treat mechanic medians as directional. The figures count entries and campaign structure; we have not published cashback redemption or slippage rates here, as that needs a dedicated redemption dataset — a subject for a follow-up report.

Admin In Consumer Engagement

Purchase to Enter Competitions in Australia

Most competition briefs arrive with the prize already settled. The car, the trip, the $50,000 — that part is decided before anyone picks up the phone to us. What’s usually still open, and treated as a detail to tidy up later, is how someone proves they bought the product.

That detail is the mechanic.

Almost nobody actually decides this

We have 63 campaigns on file at Trevor Services. 6 are internal test builds, which leaves 57 real ones. Of those 57, 53 require a receipt. 4 don’t. Not one has run on unique on-pack codes — the only code-based record in the system is a test.

That is not the output of 57 separate decisions. It’s a default, inherited from the last promotion the brand ran, which inherited it from the one before that. And it’s worth interrogating, because the ask is heavier than the brief makes it sound: keep a piece of paper you would normally bin, find it again later, photograph it well enough to be legible, and upload it. That’s four steps, and three of them happen away from the point of sale, hours or days after the shopper saw the promotion.

Now the part that complicates the obvious conclusion. Across the 45 receipt-based campaigns with a recorded entry count, the median took 379 entries. The 4 campaigns that don’t require a receipt landed at 1,491, 1,018, 266 and 67 — two above that median, two below it, which is to say no pattern at all. That isn’t a controlled comparison, and distribution differences swamp everything else in a sample that size. But if removing the biggest source of friction in the entry journey were the lever people assume it is, you would expect to see something. There’s nothing there.

Remove the receipt and you don’t automatically get volume. You just get less information about the volume you got.

What is a purchase-to-enter competition?

A purchase-to-enter competition is a promotion where buying a participating product is a condition of entry: the entrant submits proof — a photo of the receipt, or a unique code printed on or inside the pack — and that proof is validated before the entry goes into the draw. In Australia these run as trade promotions, and unlike US sweepstakes law, there is no general requirement to offer a free alternative entry route.

Which is part of why the decision gets skipped. When the law doesn’t force you to justify the purchase requirement, nobody in the room does either.

What the receipt actually buys you

Friction is a cost, not a sin. It buys something, and what it buys is attribution: every entry attached to a real transaction, which is the only honest way a competition can claim it moved units rather than moved attention. Drop the receipt and the entry file becomes a list of people who were interested. Keep it and the file becomes a list of people who bought, with the store, the date and the basket attached.

So the question isn’t how to reduce friction. It’s whether the thing this friction buys is the thing this promotion is for. If the job is trial or incremental volume, proof of purchase is load-bearing, and you should budget the validation work properly rather than discovering it in week two. If the job is reach or data capture, a purchase condition is filtering out precisely the people you were trying to find, and you’re paying for an attribution trail you’ll never open.

One caution on the validation side, since it’s the part that surprises clients: receipt checking is operational work that starts the day entries open, not the day the draw closes. You’re reading photographs of thermal-printed dockets that arrive creased, cropped, blurred, or half a metre long. Automated receipt validation handles the bulk and flags the outliers, but there is always a human queue behind it, and the campaigns that go badly are the ones that budgeted for a prize and forgot to budget for that.

Codes are better than receipts, and nobody runs them

A unique code printed on or inside the pack is the better mechanic, and it isn’t close — but not for the reason usually given. It’s not that codes are an easier ask; on our own numbers, making entry easier doesn’t reliably buy entries. It’s that a code ties the entry to a specific unit rather than to a transaction, which is a different and better piece of data: you know what was bought, not just that something was. And a properly generated code set is far harder to attack than a receipt image, which is the softest surface in promotional fraud — photographs get shared, reused and edited, and there is no version of a receipt promotion where that isn’t being attempted.

53 receipt campaigns, zero code campaigns. That gap says nothing about the mechanics and everything about when promotions get signed off. Codes need artwork changes, a print run and packs on shelf, which means the decision has to be made months before the campaign goes live. Receipts need none of that, so receipts are what you get when the promotion is approved in the same quarter it runs.

Which makes the most useful question in the whole conversation an unglamorous one: when are the packs being printed? If the answer is “they’ve been printed”, codes are off the table and you’re running receipts whether you prefer them or not. Worth establishing before the mechanic goes into a client presentation as a recommendation.

How many entries should you expect?

Nobody can tell you, and anyone quoting you a benchmark off the top of their head is guessing. Two comparable receipt-based draws from our file: a Grant Burge AFL Grand Final promotion through a single retail banner over five weeks this July took 1,775 entries against a prize pool just over $29,000; a Jacob’s Creek Australian Open promotion, four weeks over the 2025 summer, took 1,549 against a $14,000 pool. Similar shape, similar result — which looks like a benchmark until you set it against the median of 379 across all 45 campaigns with a recorded count. The distribution of outcomes is wide, and the entry mechanic is not what’s driving the width.

Distribution, prize relevance and shelf visibility do far more of the work — whether the prize means anything to that category’s shopper matters more than whether you asked for a receipt. It’s why Trudy, our predictive platform, compares a proposed promotion against past campaigns of a similar shape rather than against a category average. The useful question isn’t “what’s a good entry rate”. It’s “what happened last time someone ran this, in this category, at this distribution”.

When a free entry route earns its place

Since Australia doesn’t require one, treat it as a design choice. It earns its place when the promotion’s job is data or awareness rather than sales, and when the product is bought too infrequently for a competition to plausibly cause the purchase.

The second case is the one people get backwards. Nobody buys a fridge because there’s a competition on, so the instinct is to drop the purchase requirement and open it up. In practice the opposite is right. On a considered purchase the promotion works as a nudge at the decision point and a reason to register afterwards, and the receipt requirement fits neatly around a purchase that was going to happen or not on its own merits. The largest file we hold is exactly this: Electrolux’s always-on gift-with-purchase program, receipt-validated, 18,432 claims since 2019. Nobody bought an oven to get the bonus, but plenty of people who were already buying one registered — and every one of those registrations is attached to a product and a store. Open the same offer to people who haven’t bought anything and the extra names are, mostly, people who were never going to.

Two compliance points sit alongside this, and neither turns on whether entry requires a purchase — permits are triggered by prize value. In NSW an authority is required once total prize value exceeds $10,000, under the Community Gaming Regulation 2020. In the ACT the threshold is $3,000, administered by the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission. In South Australia it’s $5,000, and Consumer and Business Services won’t let you advertise until the licence number is issued — a scheduling problem more than a legal one, and it catches people every year. Our competition permits guide has the state-by-state detail. Separately, the ACCC is explicit that you can’t tell people buying a product will win them a prize when what they’re getting is a chance to win one. That’s usually a copy problem rather than a mechanic problem, and it usually enters late, via whoever writes the shelf talker.

The version that goes wrong

The prize is chosen first. The entry requirement is inherited from last year. Nobody checks whether the two are pulling in the same direction, so the promotion ends up carrying the attribution burden of a sales campaign and the entry volume of an awareness one — the One Job Rule, our name for picking a single objective and building to it, broken at the entry form rather than at the prize, which is where people usually look for it.

If you want a second opinion on how to structure entry for something you’re planning, we’re happy to talk it through.

Though most of it comes down to two questions you can answer without us: what is this promotion actually for, and when are the packs being printed.

Admin In Promotions

How Long Should a Promotion Run?

Almost every promotional brief that reaches us has a duration in it, and almost every one of them is a single number. Eight weeks. Six weeks. “Runs through spring.” The number is usually inherited rather than decided — it’s how long the feature is booked, or how long the media flight runs, or how long the display stays up.

Here’s the problem with one number. In our own campaign records, the gap between the last day a purchase qualifies and the last day a customer can claim is one day for prize draws and 92 days for cashbacks. Same brief format, same planning meeting, three months apart. A promotion doesn’t have one length.

A promotion has three clocks, not one

The first is the sell period — the window in which a purchase qualifies. This is the one everybody sets, because it’s the one the retailer and the media plan care about.

The second is the claim or entry window — how long a buyer has to actually do the thing: enter the draw, upload the receipt, submit the cashback.

The third is the fulfilment tail — the time between a valid claim and the money or the prize reaching the person. Verification, draw, winner contact, payment run, dispatch. It lives entirely on the operational side, which is why most briefs don’t mention it at all.

Set only the first clock and the other two default to whatever the platform, the terms template or the finance calendar happens to do.

How long should a promotion run?

For entry mechanics — prize draws, instant wins, sweepstakes — the entry window should close on the last day of sale, with a sell period of around six to nine weeks. For cashback, the claim window should stay open roughly 90 days after the last day of sale. Gift with purchase splits into two different shapes and needs a decision rather than a default.

The numbers behind that

Below is the full sample from the Trevor Services campaign book: every promotion we’ve delivered since 2019 that recorded both a final sale date and a final claim date. 54 campaigns. Nothing excluded.

Mechanic	n	Claim window after last day of sale (days)	Sell period (days)
Simple entry (draws, instant win)	28	median 1 (range −191 to 785)	median 42
Sweepstakes	9	median 1 (range 0 to 366)	median 60
Cashback	9	median 92 (range 1 to 2,244)	median 134
Gift with purchase	8	median 761 (range −12 to 1,975)	median 66

Three things in that table are worth saying plainly, including the parts that don’t flatter it.

The entry-mechanic result is the solid one. Across 37 draw and sweepstake campaigns the median gap is a single day. Entry closes when the sell period closes, consistently, and the wide range comes from a handful of multi-phase promotions where one set of dates covered several draws.

The cashback result is real but the sample is small. Nine campaigns, and the middle of the distribution is tight — 90, 92, 92, 92, 122 days — with one campaign at a single day and two long-running programmes at 1,849 and 2,244 days dragging the top. Nine is enough to notice a convention. It is not enough to call it a law, and we’d rather say so than round it into one.

The gift-with-purchase number is not a recommendation and shouldn’t be read as one. That median of 761 days is an artefact of a genuinely bimodal set: four campaign-shaped promotions at −12, 1, 61 and 92 days, and four always-on offers running past four years. There is no typical GWP claim window in our book, because GWP is doing two different jobs. The useful question isn’t “how long” — it’s which of the two you’re actually running.

And the obvious caveat: this is our book, not the market’s. These are campaigns Trevor Services scoped and built, so the conventions in it are partly our own. Take the entry-versus-redemption contrast as the finding, and the specific day counts as a starting point to argue with.

Why the wrong calendar gets used

Nearly everyone’s instinct about promotional timing was formed by prize draws, because prize draws are nearly all anyone runs.

In the live Australian promotions Trevor Services tracks, prize draws and instant wins account for 123 of 181 campaigns currently in market. Cashback accounts for four. If your mental model of “how long a promotion runs” was built on that distribution, it was built on the mechanic where entry closes on the day — and it will be wrong, by about three months, the first time you apply it to a cashback.

The structural reason is simple. A prize draw closes with an event. There’s a draw date, and everything before it is entry accumulation, collected at or near the moment of purchase. Adding weeks doesn’t make it work harder — past a point it just spends display time and media weight to collect a thinner stream of entries. If entry volume is the problem, length is rarely the fix; friction usually is.

A cashback doesn’t close with an event. It closes with the last person who bothers. The buyer purchases, gets the product home, finds the receipt, and claims — and those three steps are separated by ordinary life. The 90-odd day convention isn’t generosity. It’s roughly how long it takes a normal household to get around to it.

Shortening the claim window is a price cut you didn’t approve

Compress that window and you don’t get a faster campaign, you get a cheaper one, because more people miss the deadline. That gap between purchases and claims is slippage, and it’s a legitimate part of how cashback economics work.

But there’s a difference between planning for it and pocketing it. If you’re tightening the claim window because you want the redemption rate down, model it, price it, and put the assumption in the business case where someone can argue with it. If you’re tightening it because the promotion “ends on the 30th” and nobody thought about it, you’re taking the same commercial benefit by accident — and paying for it in escalations, complaints and manual goodwill payments that land on a team who never saw the calendar.

A cashback with a 30-day claim window is a different offer to the same cashback with 90 days. It should be signed off as one.

The pack outlives the promotion

If the offer is printed on the pack, the pack becomes a piece of advertising whose retirement date you don’t control.

The ACCC uses precisely this scenario as a worked example. It describes cans of deodorant shrink-wrapped with “$3 Cash Back” where the offer had expired a week earlier, and the expiry could only be seen in the fine print after the packaging was opened. The ACCC’s guidance on cash back offers, gifts and prizes is that the packaging is misleading, because the bold representation was made without clear mention of the limitations.

That’s a duration problem wearing a compliance costume. Stock doesn’t clear when the campaign ends. On-pack offers keep selling themselves from pantries, warehouses and the back of the shelf long after the media stops — which is the argument for treating 90 days as a floor rather than a ceiling, and for checking how long the point-of-purchase display stays up relative to the offer printed on it.

The fulfilment tail carries its own obligation. The same ACCC guidance makes it unlawful to offer a prize or gift and then fail to provide it as offered, or fail to provide it within the time specified — or, where no time is specified, within a reasonable time. An unstated fulfilment tail isn’t a neutral omission. It hands someone else the job of deciding what “reasonable” means.

What the permit calendar does to your start date

Duration has a hard floor at the front as well, and it’s the one that most often surprises people.

In New South Wales, an authority is required when the total prize value for a single trade promotion exceeds $10,000. Where an authority applies, NSW Fair Trading requires a copy of the gaming rules at least 10 working days before the promotion takes place, and the activity cannot commence until that notification has been given. Two working weeks, sitting in front of your start date, before anything goes live. The rules sit under the Community Gaming Act 2018.

The back end is regulated too. Under the same NSW guidance, if the rules don’t state a timeframe for an activity requiring an authority, the operator must keep an unclaimed prize for at least three months before a new winner can be drawn. Your promotion has a tail whether or not you wrote one. The only choice is whether you set it or inherit it.

Thresholds and processes differ across the states, which is a separate planning exercise — we’ve covered the detail in our guide to competition permits in Australia.

Three dates, set on purpose

Pick the mechanic, then let the mechanic set the calendar. Close entry on the last day of sale for a draw. Hold a cashback open about 90 days past it, longer if the offer is on-pack. Decide which kind of gift with purchase you’re running before you date it at all. Then write the fulfilment tail into the terms as a stated number of days, because it exists whether or not you name it.

The claim window is the only one of the three that is simultaneously a customer-experience decision, a compliance position and a line in the budget. It is usually the one nobody owns. None of this costs anything while it’s still a date in a planning document, and all of it is expensive afterwards, because by then the packs are printed.

If you’d like a second opinion on your dates before that, talk to us.

Admin In Promotions

How Much Should a Promotion Prize Be Worth?

Three campaigns. Identical $20,000 prize pools. They finished on 52 entries, 67 entries and 3,768 entries.

All three ran on the Trevor Services Salesforce platform for Australian brands — an appliance instant win, a wine promotion sold through a liquor wholesaler’s trade base, and a consumer wine campaign running through retail. Same prize money, a seventy-fold difference in entries. That gap is worth holding onto the next time a budget meeting opens, as they nearly always do, with the question of whether the prize is big enough.

What a promotion prize is worth on the open market

Before arguing about $20,000 versus $50,000, it’s useful to know what everyone else is spending. Of the 181 live Australian promotions Trevor Services currently tracks, 141 carried a stated prize value. Across all mechanics the median was $19,000, but that figure mixes formats that aren’t comparable. The number to use for a conventional single-winner prize draw is around $14,000.

The huge totals in the market are almost all instant wins, and they’re a different purchase entirely — the largest in the set carried a pool above $5.7 million running through licensed venues, spread over thousands of small prizes. That’s buying frequency of winning, not size of win, and it belongs in a different line of the budget.

So $14,000 or so is where the Australian market sits for a national draw. Going well above it is a decision that needs a reason, and “the prize felt small” isn’t one.

Does a bigger prize get more entries?

Not much, on our numbers. We hold both the total prize pool and the final entry count for 29 completed campaigns (pulled 9 August 2026; test records and still-running campaigns excluded). Pools ran from $3,500 to $203,262, entries from 11 to 3,899. The correlation between the two, measured on logs so the largest campaigns don’t dominate, is 0.12.

Sorted into four bands by pool size, median entries came out at 292, 359, 710 and 564, smallest pools to largest. There is a lift in there — the top half does better than the bottom half — but it’s a rough doubling of entries for something like a twenty-fold increase in prize money, and it isn’t even monotonic. The spread inside each band is far wider than the gap between bands. The biggest pool in the set, just over $203,000, returned 750 entries. A $50,000 pool returned 3,899; another at $49,900 returned 15.

Nor is it the number of winners rather than the size of the pot — we checked, and the correlation there is 0.21, no better.

Twenty-nine campaigns is small and none of it is a controlled experiment, so the honest read isn’t “prize money is irrelevant” — it’s that prize money is nowhere near the strongest thing in the equation, and something else is doing the heavy lifting. In our set it was reach and access. The campaigns at the bottom of the entry range were mostly trade activity, running to a few hundred venues or a wholesaler’s account base, where a couple of dozen entries is a reasonable result. The ones at the top ran through national retail with the offer visible where people were already shopping.

Which resolves the three campaigns at the top of this article. Their prize pools were identical. The number of people who could see and enter them was not.

What the prize budget actually has to achieve

Two things, and both are pass/fail rather than more-is-better.

The first is being worth the bother. A shopper decides quickly whether the reward justifies the effort of claiming it, and if it doesn’t, no amount of headline styling rescues it — that’s the insult threshold. A small-dollar reward sitting behind a receipt upload and a long form fails it however the offer is worded.

The second is being believable. A single major prize reads to most people as something that happens to someone else, which is why how the pool is divided is a separate decision from how big it is. Our set is too small to tell you the right split, and anyone who quotes you one with confidence is guessing — but it is a decision, and it usually gets made by whoever fills in the prize table last.

Once both are cleared, extra prize money isn’t fixing anything the shopper is weighing up. It’s just a bigger number sitting in the same place.

If the brief demands a big number, buy it rather than fund it

Sometimes a large headline prize genuinely is non-negotiable — the retailer wants it as the price of the feature, or the category is loud enough that a $15,000 draw disappears into it. When that’s the case, insure the prize rather than sit on the full liability. Prize indemnity insurance lets you advertise a prize that would be uneconomic to underwrite yourself, paying a premium against the odds of it being won instead of setting the whole amount aside. What you owe the winner doesn’t change; the ACCC expects prize and cash-back offers to run exactly as advertised. Only the cost of carrying it changes.

The money that comes back out of the pool has better places to be. Given what our numbers say about reach, on-pack real estate, shelf presence and retailer media are usually a better buy than the increment from a $20,000 major prize to a $30,000 one — as is every entry step you can delete.

So how much should a promotion prize be worth?

Enough to clear both thresholds for the job the promotion is actually doing, and not much more. A trial campaign wants breadth, because it needs a lot of people to act once. A basket-building campaign wants a reward that scales with spend. A data capture campaign needs less than most briefs assume, because an email address is a cheap thing to buy. Settling that before anyone names a prize does more for the budget than the argument about the major prize ever will.

It’s an awkward conversation to have with a brand team that has just had a bigger prize budget approved, and one Trevor Services ends up having fairly often. If there’s a prize pool sitting on your desk right now, we’re happy to have it with you.

One last number, because it’s the one that ends the argument fastest. Across those 29 campaigns, a thousand dollars of prize money bought a median of 22 entries. The best campaign in the set got 188 for the same thousand dollars. The worst got 0.18. Whatever explains a thousand-fold gap like that, it isn’t the size of the prize.

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Admin

Why whitegoods brands pay you back instead of marking down

What is an appliance cashback promotion?

The multi-buy tier is a basket loader, not a discount

Does slippage apply when the cashback is worth a thousand dollars?

The friction in an appliance cashback is verification, not a trap

So when does an appliance cashback make sense?

The arithmetic that ends most of these conversations

Basket control is the whole game

Slippage doesn’t save you here

The verification problem nobody budgets for

When it does work for a brand

What is a collect to win promotion?

Does a collect to win promotion need a permit in Australia?

Run the number before the licence call

Where the mechanic actually went

What is a self-liquidating premium promotion?

Why brands stopped

How is a self-liquidating premium different from a gift with purchase?

So is it worth reviving?

What does a competition agency actually do?

Count the winner events, not the campaign

The one thing that never transfers

Where the handover points actually sit

One question that sorts a shortlist

What do you need to run a competition in Australia?

Chance or skill: the first decision that shapes everything

The operational middle, where competitions actually fail

What happens after the draw?

The sequence, in order

What does trade promotion compliance actually involve?

When do you genuinely need a lawyer?

Where promotions actually fail on compliance

The split that actually works

The mechanic mix

How many entries does an Australian promotion get?

How long do promotions run?

What’s a normal prize pool?

Do you actually need a receipt?

What this means if you’re planning a promotion

Methodology

Almost nobody actually decides this

What is a purchase-to-enter competition?

What the receipt actually buys you

Codes are better than receipts, and nobody runs them

How many entries should you expect?

When a free entry route earns its place

The version that goes wrong

A promotion has three clocks, not one

How long should a promotion run?

The numbers behind that

Why the wrong calendar gets used

Shortening the claim window is a price cut you didn’t approve

The pack outlives the promotion

What the permit calendar does to your start date

Three dates, set on purpose

What a promotion prize is worth on the open market

Does a bigger prize get more entries?

What the prize budget actually has to achieve

If the brief demands a big number, buy it rather than fund it

So how much should a promotion prize be worth?

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