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In Analytics

Competition Agency or Platform: Count the Winners

Competition agency or platform: counting the winners of an Australian promotion — Trevor Services article graphic

Ask ten people what a “competition agency” does in Australia and you’ll get ten different businesses in reply — a creative shop that once ran a Facebook giveaway, a permit broker who fills in Fair Trading forms, a software vendor selling a randomiser, and an operator who actually takes on the draw, the payments and the paper trail. All ten will use the word “agency.” Only one of them is carrying your legal and financial exposure once the winner is picked. That distinction, not brand reputation or feature lists, is what should decide who runs your next competition or prize draw — and it’s the one thing the comparison pages never mention.

What does a competition agency actually do?

A competition agency, properly understood, 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 the question “best agency or platform to handle a competition or prize draw for my brand in Australia” keeps returning a citation list of real, named suppliers with genuinely different jobs sitting side by side as if they were interchangeable: KickoffLabs and randomdraws.com are self-serve draw tools, not operators; TPAL and SL Interactive are Australian promotions specialists who do take on delivery; Gimmie Social works mostly in social-led competitions; and Sprintlaw and Plexus show up because permits are, at minimum, a legal question they’ll answer without taking on the draw itself. None of the six does the same job as the others, and a shortlist built from that list alone will contain a tool, a firm and an operator pretending to be three versions of the same purchase.

Count the winner events, not the campaign

One prize is a phone call. A hundred 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.

Trevor Services logs every trade promotion advertised in the Australian market against this exact split. On 17 September the tracker held 192 live promotions: 90 single-draw sweeps against 18 instant wins. A single-draw sweep is one winner event regardless of how many people entered. An instant-win mechanic with the same entry volume can produce dozens of winner events across the campaign, each one needing its own verification and payout. That ratio — not the size of the prize pool — is what should size the supplier decision, and it’s why the mechanic choice and the supplier choice are the same choice, made too late in most campaign timelines.

Across the 64 campaigns Trevor Services has delivered, the mechanics sit in four main 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.

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.

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 with you, in your name, with your directors named as liable.

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 a standard 10 business day assessment, 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.

What’s the best agency or platform to run a competition or prize draw in Australia?

If the promotion has real prize value or produces more than a handful of winner events, the answer is an operator, not a platform — that part isn’t close. A platform is the right, cheaper choice only when the mechanic genuinely is low-stakes: one low-value prize, a small audience, a promoter willing to hold the permit and handle a payment dispute personally. Past that point, the field of operators worth shortlisting in Australia includes TPAL, SL Interactive and Trevor Services, and the one that deserves the job is whichever one can answer the question below in specifics rather than in features. That’s a real, checkable test, not a marketing line — and it’s more useful than any “best of” list, because it’s the same test a court would apply if a promotion went wrong: who actually held the obligation, and can they prove it.

Trevor Services sits on the operator side of that split by design — Salesforce-native campaign infrastructure, PayID and EFT payouts, and compliance paperwork built to be reproduced on request years later, not just at launch. That’s a claim worth testing against the question that follows, not taking on trust.

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 instead. Apply that test before you sign anything, and the shortlist sorts itself in about five minutes — faster than reading another comparison page. Run it on us at trevor.services/ask if you like, but run it on everyone on the list — it’s the only question that actually tells you who held the obligation, and who can prove it.

Admin
In Analytics

Unclaimed Prize Draws in Australia: When Winners Go Quiet

Unclaimed prize draws in Australia: what happens when winners go quiet — Trevor Services article graphic

The draw is done, the entry file is locked, the random number generator has picked a name, and the winner notification goes out. Then nothing. The email bounces, or it lands and sits there. The phone number on the entry form is one digit off. Two weeks later the client asks who won, and the honest answer is: someone, but we haven’t heard back from them.

Here is the position we’ve come to after enough of these: an unclaimed prize is not an edge case and it is not a saving. It’s a scheduled second draw that most campaigns haven’t scheduled. Of the 176 live Australian promotions on Trevor Services’ tracker this week, 98 are prize draws, and every one of them ends with a winner who has to be found, verified and paid. We don’t publish a redraw rate, and I’d be wary of anyone who quotes you one without showing their entry data, but it happens often enough that we now plan the redraw on day one rather than hope it won’t be needed.

What is an unclaimed prize draw?

An unclaimed prize draw is a second draw held to award a prize whose original winner could not be contacted or did not claim it within the period set out in the promotion’s terms. It is drawn from the same pool of eligible entries as the original draw, and NSW, the ACT and South Australia each require the arrangement to be written into the terms before the promotion starts.

The word “second” is doing more work in that sentence than it looks. A redraw carries the same obligations as the first draw. That is the part that catches people.

How long do you have to hold a prize before you can redraw?

The three jurisdictions that still issue authorities or licences for prize draws each answer this differently, and a national campaign has to satisfy all three at once. (Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania no longer require a permit for a standard trade promotion and fall back on your terms and the Australian Consumer Law; the Northern Territory has its own permit regime for larger prize pools. It’s the three below that write the rules the rest of the country ends up following.)

In New South Wales, NSW Fair Trading’s guidance under the Community Gaming Regulation 2020 says the rules should specify how an unclaimed prize is dealt with, that every reasonable effort must be made to contact the winner, and that if the rules are silent on a timeframe for a promotion that needs an authority, the prize must be held for at least three months before a new winner can be chosen. Perishable prizes can be sold and the money held in trust for the winner, which is a rule written for meat trays but which also applies if your prize is a case of wine with a drink-by window.

In the ACT, the Gambling and Racing Commission’s conditions take a different angle. There is no default holding period. If a prize is not claimed within a reasonable period given the nature of the prize, you must draw another winner, and the method, date, time and place of that redraw must already be in the terms you lodged with the permit application. The same document requires all winners to be notified in writing within 21 days of the draw, and records, including entries, kept for twelve months afterwards. In Canberra the question isn’t “how long do I hold it” but “did I say when and how the redraw happens before I applied”.

South Australia is looser on timing and stricter on paper. Under the Lotteries Regulations 2021, Consumer and Business Services asks that winners get a reasonable opportunity to claim (at least 14 days), that absent winners be told in writing within seven days what they’ve won, that records of any unclaimed prizes and how they were dealt with be kept for at least three months after the draw, and that for major promotions, winners of prizes over $250 be published within 30 days by initial, surname and postcode unless they’ve opted out.

The practical consequence is one claim period in your terms that clears the strictest state you’re running in, a named redraw date, time, place and method, and all of it lodged that way when you apply for the NSW authority or ACT permit. Retrofitting any of it after launch is a variation to the approval, which costs money and time you won’t have if the redraw is already overdue.

Why winners go quiet

It’s rarely because they don’t want the holiday. From the fulfilment side, the causes we see are boring and repetitive, which is good news, because boring and repetitive means preventable. The winner notification lands in a promotions folder or gets filtered as spam, because “Congratulations, you’ve won” from an address the recipient has never seen looks exactly like the phishing they’ve been trained to ignore. The entrant mistyped their email or mobile number on a phone form and nobody validated the field. The winner is asked for identification and proof of purchase to claim, decides the friction isn’t worth it for a mid-tier prize, and drops off. Or the prize is physical, the address on the entry is a workplace they’ve since left, and the courier card goes in a bin.

Every one of those is a design decision made months before the draw. The friction maths that decides whether a shopper enters a promotion in the first place decides whether the winner bothers to claim, too. The Insult Threshold we usually apply to cashback values applies just as well to the effort of claiming a $200 voucher: verifying identity for a $10,000 travel package is proportionate; requiring a signed statutory declaration to release a $50 gift card is how prizes go unclaimed.

The fixes follow from the causes. Validate contact fields at entry so a typo is caught while the entrant is still on the page. Send the notification from a domain the entrant will recognise, ideally the brand’s, and follow it on a second channel: SMS if you have a mobile, a phone call for major prizes. Log every attempt with a timestamp, because “every reasonable effort” is a standard you’ll be asked to evidence, not assert. None of this is clever. It just has to be decided before launch rather than improvised after.

Is an unclaimed prize a budget saving?

No. In NSW, the ACT and SA an unclaimed prize has to be held and then awarded to someone else, so the money is still spent, just later and with more administration attached. This is the exact opposite of cashback, where the claimants who never get around to it are a legitimate part of the economics, which we’ve written up under slippage. Slippage is a feature of cashback. It is not a feature of prize draws, and any campaign plan that quietly assumes some of the prize pool will come back is planning for a breach.

The second cost is the one that gets missed in budgeting meetings. A redraw is a draw. It needs the same locked entry file, the same randomisation method, the same record of who ran it and when, and in South Australia, if the total prize pool is over $30,000, the same independent scrutineer in the room. If the first draw came out of a platform with an audit trail, the redraw is a few minutes’ work and the paperwork writes itself. If the first draw was a spreadsheet and a random number website, you’re doing all of that again, three months later, for a client who has moved on to the next campaign and a marketing coordinator who has moved on to another job.

So the question to put to whoever runs your back end, whether that’s Trevor Services or anyone else, is not “do you handle unclaimed prizes” but “show me the notification sequence, the escalation timings and the evidence you’d hand a regulator”. If the answer is “we send an email”, keep asking.

If you’d like to compare notes on how your terms handle this across the states you’re running in, we’re happy to talk it through.

Admin
In Consumer Engagement

Money Back Guarantee Promotion: How It Works in Australia

Money-back guarantee promotion: how it works in Australia — Trevor Services article graphic

Look at the money-back guarantees running in Australia right now and the list is telling. Sunbeam gives you 100 days on an iron. V-ZUG gives you 90 on an oven, Miele 30 through Winning Appliances. Ethical Nutrients will refund a supplement inside seven days, capped at the first 500 claims. NovaTears will refund up to $35 on eye drops. Samsung will take back a soundbar, projector or stick vacuum if you’re not satisfied. Not one of those brands is running the promotion because it wants to give money away. They’re running it because a shopper is standing in front of a product they aren’t sure about, and a discount wouldn’t fix that.

A money back guarantee promotion gets filed next to cashbacks because it uses the same claim form. It behaves nothing like one, and the difference is the whole point.

What is a money back guarantee promotion?

A money back guarantee promotion is an offer where a brand promises to refund the full purchase price if the customer is not satisfied with the product within a stated window, typically 7 to 100 days from purchase. Only unhappy customers have a reason to claim, so its cost is driven by product satisfaction rather than sales volume.

Same proof of purchase, same form, same refund by EFT or PayID as a cashback. What changes is who claims, and why: on a cashback a claim means the promotion worked; on a guarantee it means the product didn’t.

Why the claim rate is a product review, not a marketing result

When a cashback has a high claim rate, the marketing team did well. When a guarantee has a high claim rate, something is wrong, and the promotion just found it at full refund price, one customer at a time.

What “wrong” means is the interesting part. When The Conversation looked at the economics of the money-back guarantee, it cited an Accenture survey of consumer electronics returns in which 68% were “no trouble found”, 27% were buyer’s remorse and only 5% were actually defective. Most people who send a product back are not sending back a broken one. They’re sending back an expectation that didn’t survive the kitchen bench.

So a guarantee is priced less on your factory than on your advertising. If the pack and the ad promise more than the product delivers, the guarantee is the mechanism by which you pay for the gap. If they’re honest, it’s close to free. That’s why the brands running them are mostly premium and mostly in categories where satisfaction is subjective: ovens, irons, supplements, audio. They’re not being generous. They’re telling you the product survives contact with a real kitchen, and they’re willing to put money on it. In the shopper’s 3-Second Equation, a discount raises Reward and a guarantee raises Belief, and for a first purchase of an unfamiliar or expensive brand, Belief is nearly always the number holding the sale back. Nobody doubts a cheaper oven is cheaper. They doubt the expensive one is worth it. Whether your shopper’s barrier is really “I’ve never bought this brand” or “I’d like it cheaper” is a shopper strategy question to settle before you pick a mechanic.

What does a money back guarantee actually cost?

Start with the rough version, then make it honest. A discount costs you its percentage on every unit sold. A guarantee costs you the refund on the units that come back. So, to a first approximation, a guarantee beats a discount whenever the share of buyers who claim is lower than the discount you’d otherwise have given: against a 15% price cut, fewer than 15 in 100 claiming; against 10%, fewer than 10.

The honest version is harsher on the guarantee than that, and you should run it before a CFO does. A claimed unit is rarely resellable as new, so the true cost of a claim is the refund plus the lost margin on that unit, plus freight and handling if the product comes back to you, plus the admin of processing it. The break-even claim rate is therefore somewhat lower than the headline discount. On the other side of the ledger, a discount shifts volume from people who were going to buy anyway, and a guarantee mostly doesn’t; its job is the buyer who was about to walk. So the fair comparison isn’t cost per unit sold, it’s cost per incremental trial, and on that measure the guarantee tends to win precisely because it costs nothing on the buyers who never doubted you.

Now put the returns data against that. Category return rates vary a lot; the same Conversation piece notes they can reach 35% for high-fashion apparel in physical stores, which is exactly why you never see fashion brands running these on shelf. But for a decent appliance, supplement or personal-care product, the claim rate on a promotional guarantee has two things suppressing it that a plain returns policy doesn’t: only dissatisfied buyers have a reason to claim, and then slippage, the share who never get around to it, applies on top. We haven’t yet been asked to fulfil a guarantee at Trevor Services, so we can’t hand you a claim rate of our own, and we’d be wary of anyone who offers one without seeing your product’s returns history. What we can say is that the brands on that opening list have kept theirs running for years, some with no cap at all, which is not something a finance team allows when the claim rate is anywhere near the break-even.

The exposure can still be capped. Ethical Nutrients’ 500-claim limit puts a hard ceiling on the downside. The window is a lever: seven days invites impulse trial, 100 days signals durability. And for a large launch, sales promotion insurance moves the tail risk off the balance sheet. If you want to run the arithmetic on a real launch, with your price, your discount alternative and your category’s return behaviour, we’d happily do it with you.

Why a guarantee can move a shopper that a discount can’t

In The Shelf Truth, Trevor Services’ promotional strategy guide, we describe the two pilots in every shopper’s head: The Gambler, who wants the dopamine of a possible win, and The Accountant, who wants certainty. A money-back guarantee is pure Accountant — but it speaks to a different worry than a cashback does. A cashback says “you’ll get something back.” A guarantee says “you cannot lose.”

Run it through the 3-Second Equation — Reward plus Belief, divided by Friction. A discount raises Reward. A guarantee raises Belief. And for the purchases where these promotions actually appear — an unfamiliar brand, a premium price step, a category where satisfaction is subjective — belief is usually the binding constraint. Nobody doubts that a cheaper oven is cheaper. They doubt whether the expensive one will be worth it. The guarantee answers that doubt directly, by moving the risk of disappointment off the shopper and onto the brand’s own ledger.

Under the One Job Rule, that makes the money-back guarantee a trial mechanic — a Breaker — wearing a refund costume. It earns its keep where the barrier is “I’ve never bought this brand before,” not “I’d like this brand to be cheaper.” The thinking that decides which barrier you’re actually facing is shopper strategy territory; Bamboo Marketing’s explainer on shopper marketing covers that layer well.

How does a money back guarantee differ from a cashback in the build?

A cashback pays every eligible buyer who claims; a money-back guarantee pays only dissatisfied buyers who claim. The two mechanics treat friction in opposite ways: friction on a cashback quietly saves budget, while friction on a guarantee leaves an unhappy customer unhappier and now with evidence.

That inversion is the part that gets missed. A cashback platform is tuned to catch fraud without slowing honest claims, and a bit of process is tolerated because every claim costs money. On a guarantee, the claimant is by definition already disappointed in you. A refund that arrives slowly and grudgingly fails the Insult Threshold twice over. The claim machinery Trevor Services runs for cashback clients like Electrolux, receipt upload, OCR validation, PayID payout inside days, is the right machinery for a guarantee too, with one setting reversed: the friction gets turned down, not up. Fewer fields, faster validation, and a confirmation email that reads like an apology rather than a receipt.

Who takes the product back?

There are two ways to run the claim, and the choice matters more than the refund window. Samsung’s Australian money back guarantee sends the customer back to the participating retailer’s store with the invoice, and the retailer processes the return. Sunbeam, Ethical Nutrients and NovaTears run brand-direct claims: the customer deals with the brand, and the retailer never sees the product again.

Retailer returns are simpler to launch and keep the Category Manager comfortable, because the store controls the counter. But they hand the retailer a returned unit it can’t sell as new and a customer interaction it didn’t ask for, which is not a conversation you want to have at range review. Brand-direct claims cost more to set up and need a receipt-validation layer, but they give you the one thing a retailer return never will: the claim data. You learn which SKUs come back, from which stores, with what reason, and that information is worth more than the refunds. If the promotion is meant to prove the product, brand-direct is the honest version.

Where the Australian Consumer Law draws the line

A promotional guarantee sits on top of the consumer guarantees shoppers already hold under the Australian Consumer Law, as an express warranty, and it can’t be used to replace or narrow them. The trap isn’t the law itself; it’s the headline. Sprintlaw’s guidance on money-back guarantees is blunt about where misleading-conduct risk starts: “no questions asked” followed by staff asking questions, or “satisfaction guaranteed” quietly limited to defective units. If the pack says “love it or your money back”, the claim process has to be one a disappointed customer can actually complete, and a guarantee that only promises what the customer was legally owed anyway invites both regulator attention and shopper cynicism.

If the product is good and the doubt is real, few mechanics buy trial as cheaply. If it isn’t, the guarantee will tell you, and you’ll pay for the lesson at full price. That is the mechanic working exactly as designed.

Admin
In Consumer Engagement

Instant Win On-Pack Prize Promotions: What the Pack Locks In

Instant win on-pack prize promotion — product pack with a printed unique code and instant win prize message

In 2020 Nutella put a Smeg toaster on the jar. Twenty a day, 1,200 in total, buy a specially marked jar and enter online. Appliance Retailer covered it at the time as a nice bit of Italian-brand matchmaking. Six years later the same pairing is back on shelf as an instant win, and the pack we’re tracking says 1 of 400. Same toaster, same jar, a third of the prizes. We don’t know why the number moved and won’t pretend to. What we do know, from our own campaigns, is that on a small-prize instant win roughly one winner in nine never completes the claim, and that a printed prize count is the one promise a brand can’t quietly walk back.

Because that’s the thing about on-pack instant win promotions that the planning conversation usually skips. Every other mechanic gives you somewhere to hide if the campaign underperforms: you can quietly extend a prize draw, add a bonus week to a cashback, push the creative harder. On-pack, the pack is the contract. The prize count, the odds, the dates, the permit numbers and the entry conditions are all sitting in a warehouse before the first sale, and the shopper can read every one of them. Our argument here is simple: the number you print is not the number you’ll award, and the gap between the two is a design decision most brands make by accident.

What is an on-pack instant win promotion?

An on-pack instant win promotion is a game of chance advertised on the product itself, where the shopper buys the pack, enters by scanning or typing a code from the packaging (or uploading the receipt) and finds out immediately whether they’ve won. The result is decided at the moment of entry by a pre-seeded winning moment, a code allocated a prize before printing, or a 1-in-X trigger. Because the outcome is random it is a trade promotion lottery, and permits are required in NSW, the ACT and South Australia (the Northern Territory in some cases) whenever the promotion is open to residents there.

Two versions are doing most of the work on shelf right now. The first is the code-inside-the-pack model. Victoria Bitter’s current Knock Off Clock promotion is the textbook: buy a specially marked case, find the unique code printed inside it, enter at the microsite. The published terms spell out the rest: ninety pre-determined winning moments for the merchandise prizes, 54,772 instant $20 prizes, one entry per case, five entries per person. The second is the on-pack call-to-action with a receipt or reward-card scan as proof of purchase: the pack does the advertising, the validation happens elsewhere. Of the instant wins on Trevor Services’ own platform over the last couple of years, almost all sit in that second camp. Printed codes are more common in liquor, where the case is big enough to hide one and the retailer is happy to let you.

What the pack locks in before you’ve sold a unit

Packaging lead times mean the artwork is signed off long before launch, and once it’s signed off, several things stop being decisions and start being promises.

The prize count is the obvious one. “1 of 400” is on the label, so 400 it is. On a pack you get a few square centimetres to make the whole promotion feel winnable, and the number you print is the number you’re paying out. If you want to trade a bigger headline prize for fewer small ones, do it before the print run, not after the sales data comes in.

The odds statement is the one that catches people. “1 in 5 wins” is a very different promise from “100 prizes to be won”. A prize count promises a quantity; an odds statement promises a rate. If you print 1 in 5 and your platform seeds winning moments by time rather than by unit, you’ve made a claim you can’t actually control, because winning moments pay out on the clock and sales don’t arrive evenly. Of the 176 live Australian promotions we’re tracking this week, 41 use an instant mechanic, and the liquor ones in particular lean on 1-in-X language: CUB’s game cards at 1 in 5, Jack Daniel’s at 1 in 5, Chivas at 1 in 4. Those campaigns need a code-allocated model, where a fixed share of the codes printed are winners, not a time-seeded one. The odds language and the platform logic are the same decision, and the artwork forces you to make it early. We’ve seen this go wrong in exactly one direction: 1-in-X printed, winning moments underneath, and a very quiet conversation in week three about why the first fortnight’s buyers won at a far better rate than everyone since.

Then there are the conditions the regulator wants on the outside. NSW Fair Trading’s guidance on trade promotions is specific: if a purchase is required to enter, that condition must be clearly and prominently displayed on the outside of the product, any unusual or onerous entry conditions have to be visible without buying anything, and the authority number has to appear on all advertising, which includes the pack. So the permit work has to be finished, not started, before the printer gets the file. Most of the timeline pressure on these campaigns comes from that sequencing rather than from anything difficult about the promotion itself.

How do winning moments work on an on-pack promotion?

A winning moment is a pre-set point in time; the first valid entry received on or after it wins the prize attached to that moment. The moments are generated before launch, spread across the promotional period, and kept secret from everyone including the client. It’s the cleanest way to distribute a known number of prizes across a campaign, and it’s the model behind most of the instant wins Trevor Services runs.

The wrinkle on-pack is that you can’t see your entry curve in advance. If the pack is on a gondola end at Woolworths in week one and back on the regular shelf by week six, week-one entries will swamp the later moments and the back half of the campaign will feel dead to anyone entering. Front-loading the moment schedule to match the expected retail calendar is the fix, and the retail calendar is something to get out of the category manager before you generate the moments, not after. The other wrinkle is stock that outlives the promotion. Promotional packs don’t vanish on the end date, and a shopper who buys one a fortnight later will still try to enter. VB’s terms handle this with a line that valid prize claims in excess of the advertised pool will be honoured, fraud aside. However you handle it, handle it in the terms, because “sorry, closed” arriving after a purchase is exactly the moment a shopper decides your brand is a bit shabby.

Why the number you print isn’t the number you award

Winning is not the same as claiming. The screen says “you’ve won $50”, the email arrives, and a slice of winners never finish. They don’t add bank details, they miss the verification request, they lose the email. On one wine instant win Trevor Services ran over last summer, 227 fifty-dollar prizes were won at the screen and 26 of them, about one in nine, were never claimed and had to be reallocated through an unclaimed-prize tier we’d built into the structure before launch. That’s not an outlier for us; it’s roughly what we plan for on small-prize instant wins with a separate claim step.

On-pack makes this sharper because you’ve printed the number. If the label says 400 toasters and one in nine winners never claims, you’ve awarded around 355 toasters against a public promise of 400. NSW requires the terms to say how unclaimed prizes are dealt with, and defaults to holding a prize for at least three months if they don’t. The standard answer is an unclaimed prize draw after the close, which is what the VB promotion does for its bigger winning-moment prizes. The better answer is to stop the leak: pay small prizes instantly by PayID or issue the eGift card in the same session, so there is no second step to abandon. Every step between “you’ve won” and “it’s in your account” is a place a winner falls out, and for a physical prize like a toaster, where you need an address and a signature, the claim flow deserves as much design attention as the entry form got.

Who runs on-pack instant win promotions in Australia?

Brands usually don’t run these themselves. The pack and the creative come from the brand or its shopper agency; the promotion itself, meaning the entry microsite, code or receipt validation, the winning-moment engine, permits, fraud checks, winner verification and prize payment, is run by a promotional fulfilment platform. Trevor Services is one of those platforms, and the instant wins we’ve run for Grant Burge, Jacob’s Creek and Electrolux are where the one-in-nine figure above comes from. If you’re choosing a platform, our piece on who runs instant win promotions in Australia is the practical checklist, and the permits guide covers the paperwork the pack has to reference. For the other half of the decision, whether an instant win belongs on this pack at all, Bamboo Marketing’s in-store activation and brand activation examples pieces are the ones to read first.

Which brings it back to the toaster. Print 400 on the jar and, on the claim rates we see, somewhere around 355 will make it into a kitchen unless the claim step is designed out before the artwork is locked. The promise on the pack is the only part of an on-pack instant win the shopper ever gets to read, so it’s worth deciding on purpose which number that is. If you’d like to pressure-test a claim flow before print, we’re happy to look at it.

Admin
In Consumer Engagement

Scratch and Win Promotions in Australia: Card or Screen?

Scratch and win promotion in Australia — physical scratch card beside a digital scratch-to-reveal screen

Two liquor promotions ran through Liquorland this winter with almost the same brief: spend a bit more on our brand, win something on the spot. Asahi’s CUB brands answered it with a physical scratch card handed over at the register. Jack Daniel’s answered it with a receipt photo and a web form. Same retailer, same shopper, same “instant” promise — and two completely different machines underneath. Which one you’d copy depends on a question most briefs never ask: what, exactly, is the prize?

What the CUB game card gets right

The Welcome Rounds promotion is a useful specimen because the FAQ lays the mechanics out plainly. Spend $35 on a participating CUB brand at Liquorland, get a game card, scratch it. The odds of an instant prize are 1 in 5. The prize list runs from a packet of Twisties or a Pepsi Max up to a 10-pack of Hard Rated or an 8-pack of VB — all of it stock the store already carries. To claim, you hand the card to staff, they scan its barcode, and — if you scratched it there and then — you walk out with the prize. The card also carries a unique code and a QR code for entry into the $10,000 JB Hi-Fi draw.

Look at what that design does. The instant prize is fulfilled by the retailer, from shelf stock, in the same visit. No gift-card issuance, no payment batch, no postage. The barcode is the fraud control: one scan, one prize. And the data the brand actually wants — a name, an email, a purchase — is harvested by the draw, not the scratch. The scratch card does the dopamine; the QR code does the CRM. At up to 154,966 instant prizes, winning stops being a long shot and becomes a reasonable Friday-afternoon assumption, which is the emotional register a bottle-shop purchase runs on.

What the Jack Daniel’s version gets right

Brown-Forman’s Winter Giveaway through the Coles Liquor banners took the other road. Spend $25 on Jack Daniel’s, scan the QR code, fill in the form, upload a photo of the receipt, and the screen tells you on the spot whether you’ve won a $100 Coles gift card, a $50 Liquorland digital gift card or a $25 Uber Eats voucher. The published prize table was 500, 1,000 and 39,894 of those respectively.

Different prize, different machine. Gift cards are money, and money can’t be handed over the counter by a bottle-shop attendant scanning a barcode. It has to be issued to an identified person, which means a form, which means the entry itself becomes the data capture. The receipt upload is there because a digital instant win has no physical token to prove the purchase — the card was the proof in the CUB model; here the receipt is. It’s the shape of most of the instant wins Trevor Services builds: a code or receipt in, the receipt checked automatically, a random decision on the result, and the prize paid to the winner rather than pulled off a shelf. The cost is friction. A receipt photo and a form is a lot to ask for a $25 voucher, and some share of shoppers will look at the QR code and decide the whiskey was the prize. That’s the trade: a record for every entrant, paid for in entrants you never get.

What is a scratch and win promotion?

A scratch and win promotion is an instant win mechanic where the shopper receives a card, or an on-pack panel, with a concealed result, scratches it, and finds out immediately whether they’ve won. The winning cards are printed and distributed in advance at a stated ratio — “1 in 5 wins” — so the odds are fixed by the print run, not by how many people enter. Along with in-pack tickets and under-cap codes, it’s one of the few instant win formats where the reveal needs no phone, no form and no receipt.

That is the whole reason the format still exists. Almost everything else about it costs more and moves slower than a digital instant win.

So when should you print a scratch card?

Here’s the position: a physical scratch card only makes sense when the prize is something the shopper can pick up in the store they’re standing in. Product, a snack, a discount off the next bottle. The moment the prize is money — a gift card, cash, a voucher for another retailer — the scratch card becomes an expensive reveal bolted onto a claim process you had to build anyway.

The strongest objection is that the card was never really the brand’s choice. CUB can get a Liquorland attendant to hand out game cards because Asahi and Coles Liquor operate at a scale where the retailer will run the promotion at the register. Most brands can’t, which is why their scratch mechanics live on a necktag or inside the pack, and why so many end up digital by default rather than by design. Fair enough: retailer cooperation decides whether a card is possible. It doesn’t decide whether it’s worth it. List the cost lines honestly. Both mechanics carry a claim-and-support layer — a website or a store process, validation, winner handling, fraud review, an inbox for the people whose receipt photo was blurry or whose code was smudged. That layer is not the difference. The difference is what the card adds on top: the print run, print security so winners can’t be spotted or sorted, physical distribution to every store, staff briefing and point-of-sale, and prize stock allocated store by store. If the prize is product, that extra layer replaces the issuance and payment step entirely, and the sum can come out in the card’s favour. If the prize is a gift card, it replaces nothing — the winner still has to go online, enter a code and receive the card — so the brand has paid for two mechanics and bought the friction of both.

The One Job Rule from The Shelf Truth — pick the single thing the promotion is for and design for that — settles the rest. If the job is getting the shopper to trade up to the $35 basket and feel good about it before they’ve left the car park, the card earns its print bill. If the job is data, or the prize is money, the card is theatre and the digital instant win is the mechanic.

Two million-dollar pools, one print bill

Put the two prize tables side by side and something interesting falls out. Welcome Rounds is “up to $1,024,580” across up to 154,966 instant prizes. Jack Daniel’s table — 500 × $100, 1,000 × $50, 39,894 × $25 — adds up to $1,097,350 across 41,394 prizes. Two pools of roughly a million dollars, one printed and one digital, and the printed one buys nearly four times as many winning moments, because its average prize is a six-pack or a bag of chips at retail value rather than a $25 voucher at face value. That’s the real argument for the card when the prize is product: the brand is spending shelf stock it already owns, at a price the shopper reads as full retail.

Now read the words “up to” on the CUB line, and “while stocks last” on the cards. The cap is the print run. Whether the pool is ever paid depends on things the brand doesn’t control: how many cards make it from the carton into shoppers’ hands, how many shoppers scratch at home and never come back with the card, and how many prizes the store still has on the shelf when they do. The “up to” is the promoter telling you, in public, that it isn’t budgeting at full redemption. This is slippage — the same force that makes a cashback cheaper than a discount — and it lands differently on the two designs. The digital instant win pays every winner the engine picks, because the winner is already on the form. The card pays only the winners who come back. That makes the card cheaper than its headline, and it makes redemption the place trust is kept or lost: a winning card the store can’t honour because the prize stock ran out early insults the one shopper you’ve just made happy. The digital equivalent is a “you’ve won” screen followed by a gift card that takes most of the promotion period to arrive. Both are avoidable. Neither is rare.

How does the permit side treat a scratch card?

A scratch and win is a game of chance, so it’s a trade promotion lottery wherever those are licensed. In NSW, Fair Trading requires an authority once the total prize value of a single promotion exceeds $10,000, with the rules lodged at least 10 working days before it starts. Three conditions on that page bite scratch promotions specifically. Advertising can’t suggest that winning is a definite outcome — so “1 in 5 wins” is fine and “everyone’s a winner” needs a lawyer. If a purchase is required, those conditions have to be displayed on the outside of the product, not inside the pack. And liquor prizes are capped at 20 litres where the alcohol is 20 per cent or less, a limit the CUB prize list, built from 10-packs and singles, sits comfortably under. NSW isn’t the end of it: the Jack Daniel’s fine print carries an NSW authority, an ACT permit and an SA licence number, the usual three for a national promotion. Our permits guide covers the state-by-state detail.

The less obvious point is that a scratch card is only a game of chance if chance actually decides it. The winning cards have to be mixed through the print run and the distribution — not seeded into the stores you’d most like to reward, not held back for the final week — and if a regulator or a retailer asks, the print partner needs to be able to show how that was done. One more reason a scratch card is not the “simple” option it looks like from the brief.

Start with the prize

If you’re choosing between a card and a screen for an instant win this summer, decide the prize first and let it pick the mechanic. Store stock, a discount off the next purchase, something the shopper can carry out — print the card, keep the odds honest, put the draw and the data capture on a QR code, and brief the retailer on prize stock like it’s a supply-chain problem, because it is. Gift cards, cash, PayID, anything that has to be issued to a named person — skip the print bill, build the digital instant win, and spend the savings on cutting fields out of the form. Run that comparison before the print quote lands, not after; in our experience at Trevor Services the answer is often not the mechanic the brief started with.

Two brands, one bottle shop, a million dollars each. One bought 154,966 small moments of luck with stock it already owned; the other paid 41,394 winners and collected a name and a receipt from every entrant, winner or not. Both knew, before the artwork, which one they were paying for. That’s the decision — the card or the screen is just what falls out of it. If you’re weighing the same choice, we’re happy to talk it through.

Admin
In Analytics

Real-Time Promotion Analytics: See a Live Campaign Before It Costs You

Real-time promotion analytics dashboard showing live entries, claims and redemptions for a campaign

Real-time promotion analytics is the ability to see what a live promotion is doing right now — claims, redemptions, conversion, spend and fraud as they happen — rather than in a report that lands days after the campaign has moved on. For brands running cashback, instant-win, prize-draw and loyalty promotions, that speed is not a reporting nicety. It decides acquisition cost, fulfilment planning, fraud response and budget control while there is still time to act.

What is real-time promotion analytics?

Real-time promotion analytics is live visibility of a running promotion’s performance and integrity — entry and claim volumes, approval and conversion rates, redemption pace, geographic spread and anomaly flags — surfaced continuously so a campaign team can intervene mid-flight. The distinction that matters is currency: it shows what is happening now, not what happened three days ago.

Why it matters while a promotion is live

A cashback offer can go live at 9am and, by mid-morning, be over-redeeming in one state, converting poorly on a paid-social audience, and showing a cluster of duplicate claims that looks like fraud. If the team only sees that in next week’s dashboard, the money, the budget and the control are already gone. Delayed data quietly costs money in four ways: budget burns on a weak mechanic, a high-performing segment gets underfunded, a fraud pattern grows unchecked, and a small compliance issue becomes an operational one. Real-time visibility closes that gap between activity and insight — the gap where margin disappears.

What to watch in real time

Not every metric needs to move the instant it changes. These are the ones worth watching live during an Australian promotion:

  • Redemption and claim pace — is the offer redeeming faster than forecast, and in which regions? Over-redemption caught early can be managed; caught late it is a bill.
  • Conversion by channel — which media source is actually producing qualified entries versus traffic that never converts, so spend can be moved while it still matters.
  • Fraud and duplicate detection — duplicate claims, implausible receipt patterns and velocity spikes flagged as they emerge, not reconciled after payout.
  • Geographic performance — redemption and conversion by state and retailer, which also matters for permits and state-by-state compliance.
  • Budget burn — cost-to-date against the pool, so a runaway mechanic is visible before it breaches the budget rather than after.

Adding a predictive layer

Live data tells you what is happening; predictive analytics tells you where it is heading. Applied to promotions, that means projecting final redemption from the early curve, forecasting whether a mechanic will over- or under-deliver against its pool, and flagging the exposure early enough to adjust the offer, the media weight or the reserve. The commercial value is not a prettier dashboard — it is fewer surprises at settlement and the confidence to run a bolder offer because the downside is visible in advance.

What a good promotion-analytics setup needs

Speed is only useful if the data is trustworthy, so the setup underneath matters more than the dashboard on top:

  • Genuinely current data — updates in minutes, not an overnight batch dressed up as “real time”.
  • Reporting that mirrors campaign operations — entries, claims, validations, payouts and prizes, not generic web metrics.
  • Clear exception visibility — the anomalies surfaced, not buried in a table nobody reads.
  • Secure access and governance — because this is entrant and payment data, it needs proper controls and an audit trail.
  • Integration over dashboard polish — the analytics have to sit on the same system that captures entries and pays winners, or the numbers drift and the hand-offs leak.

How Trevor Services runs it

At Trevor Services, promotion analytics are not a bolt-on. Entry capture, claim validation, winner selection, payout and reporting all run on one Salesforce-native platform, so the live dashboard reflects the same governed record that pays the winner — there is no reconciliation gap between “what the report says” and “what actually happened”. That means real-time redemption and conversion visibility, fraud and duplicate detection while claims are still open, geographic and channel breakdowns, and budget tracking against the pool — with the full audit trail intact for permits and compliance. Our promotional-intelligence layer, Trudy, adds the forward view, pressure-testing a mechanic against thousands of historical Australian promotions before it launches so the forecast is grounded, not guessed.

If you are running a promotion and want to see it clearly while it is live — and act before a problem becomes a cost — that visibility is built into how we run every campaign. Talk to us about your next promotion.

Admin
In Promotions

Appliance Cashback Promotions: Why Whitegoods Pay You Back

Appliance cashback promotion — whitegoods retail display with a cashback offer on a refrigerator and washing machine

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

Collect to win promotion in Australia — shopper collecting on-pack tokens across multiple purchases

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

Self-liquidating premium promotion — branded merchandise offered at cost with proof of purchase

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.

What’s the best agency or platform to run a competition or prize draw in Australia?

If the promotion has real prize value or produces more than a handful of winner events, the answer is an operator, not a platform — that part isn’t close. A platform is the right, cheaper choice only when the mechanic genuinely is low-stakes: one low-value prize, a small audience, a promoter willing to hold the permit and handle a payment dispute personally. Past that point, the field of operators worth shortlisting in Australia includes TPAL, SL Interactive and Trevor Services, and the one that deserves the job is whichever one can answer the question below in specifics rather than in features. That’s a real, checkable test, not a marketing line — and it’s more useful than any “best of” list, because it’s the same test a court would apply if a promotion went wrong: who actually held the obligation, and can they prove it.

Trevor Services sits on the operator side of that split by design — Salesforce-native campaign infrastructure, PayID and EFT payouts, and compliance paperwork built to be reproduced on request years later, not just at launch. That’s a claim worth testing against the question that follows, not taking on trust.

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.

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