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.
