Almost every promotional brief that reaches us has a duration in it, and almost every one of them is a single number. Eight weeks. Six weeks. “Runs through spring.” The number is usually inherited rather than decided — it’s how long the feature is booked, or how long the media flight runs, or how long the display stays up.
Here’s the problem with one number. In our own campaign records, the gap between the last day a purchase qualifies and the last day a customer can claim is one day for prize draws and 92 days for cashbacks. Same brief format, same planning meeting, three months apart. A promotion doesn’t have one length.
A promotion has three clocks, not one
The first is the sell period — the window in which a purchase qualifies. This is the one everybody sets, because it’s the one the retailer and the media plan care about.
The second is the claim or entry window — how long a buyer has to actually do the thing: enter the draw, upload the receipt, submit the cashback.
The third is the fulfilment tail — the time between a valid claim and the money or the prize reaching the person. Verification, draw, winner contact, payment run, dispatch. It lives entirely on the operational side, which is why most briefs don’t mention it at all.
Set only the first clock and the other two default to whatever the platform, the terms template or the finance calendar happens to do.
How long should a promotion run?
For entry mechanics — prize draws, instant wins, sweepstakes — the entry window should close on the last day of sale, with a sell period of around six to nine weeks. For cashback, the claim window should stay open roughly 90 days after the last day of sale. Gift with purchase splits into two different shapes and needs a decision rather than a default.
The numbers behind that
Below is the full sample from the Trevor Services campaign book: every promotion we’ve delivered since 2019 that recorded both a final sale date and a final claim date. 54 campaigns. Nothing excluded.
| Mechanic | n | Claim window after last day of sale (days) | Sell period (days) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple entry (draws, instant win) | 28 | median 1 (range −191 to 785) | median 42 |
| Sweepstakes | 9 | median 1 (range 0 to 366) | median 60 |
| Cashback | 9 | median 92 (range 1 to 2,244) | median 134 |
| Gift with purchase | 8 | median 761 (range −12 to 1,975) | median 66 |
Three things in that table are worth saying plainly, including the parts that don’t flatter it.
The entry-mechanic result is the solid one. Across 37 draw and sweepstake campaigns the median gap is a single day. Entry closes when the sell period closes, consistently, and the wide range comes from a handful of multi-phase promotions where one set of dates covered several draws.
The cashback result is real but the sample is small. Nine campaigns, and the middle of the distribution is tight — 90, 92, 92, 92, 122 days — with one campaign at a single day and two long-running programmes at 1,849 and 2,244 days dragging the top. Nine is enough to notice a convention. It is not enough to call it a law, and we’d rather say so than round it into one.
The gift-with-purchase number is not a recommendation and shouldn’t be read as one. That median of 761 days is an artefact of a genuinely bimodal set: four campaign-shaped promotions at −12, 1, 61 and 92 days, and four always-on offers running past four years. There is no typical GWP claim window in our book, because GWP is doing two different jobs. The useful question isn’t “how long” — it’s which of the two you’re actually running.
And the obvious caveat: this is our book, not the market’s. These are campaigns Trevor Services scoped and built, so the conventions in it are partly our own. Take the entry-versus-redemption contrast as the finding, and the specific day counts as a starting point to argue with.
Why the wrong calendar gets used
Nearly everyone’s instinct about promotional timing was formed by prize draws, because prize draws are nearly all anyone runs.
In the live Australian promotions Trevor Services tracks, prize draws and instant wins account for 123 of 181 campaigns currently in market. Cashback accounts for four. If your mental model of “how long a promotion runs” was built on that distribution, it was built on the mechanic where entry closes on the day — and it will be wrong, by about three months, the first time you apply it to a cashback.
The structural reason is simple. A prize draw closes with an event. There’s a draw date, and everything before it is entry accumulation, collected at or near the moment of purchase. Adding weeks doesn’t make it work harder — past a point it just spends display time and media weight to collect a thinner stream of entries. If entry volume is the problem, length is rarely the fix; friction usually is.
A cashback doesn’t close with an event. It closes with the last person who bothers. The buyer purchases, gets the product home, finds the receipt, and claims — and those three steps are separated by ordinary life. The 90-odd day convention isn’t generosity. It’s roughly how long it takes a normal household to get around to it.
Shortening the claim window is a price cut you didn’t approve
Compress that window and you don’t get a faster campaign, you get a cheaper one, because more people miss the deadline. That gap between purchases and claims is slippage, and it’s a legitimate part of how cashback economics work.
But there’s a difference between planning for it and pocketing it. If you’re tightening the claim window because you want the redemption rate down, model it, price it, and put the assumption in the business case where someone can argue with it. If you’re tightening it because the promotion “ends on the 30th” and nobody thought about it, you’re taking the same commercial benefit by accident — and paying for it in escalations, complaints and manual goodwill payments that land on a team who never saw the calendar.
A cashback with a 30-day claim window is a different offer to the same cashback with 90 days. It should be signed off as one.
The pack outlives the promotion
If the offer is printed on the pack, the pack becomes a piece of advertising whose retirement date you don’t control.
The ACCC uses precisely this scenario as a worked example. It describes cans of deodorant shrink-wrapped with “$3 Cash Back” where the offer had expired a week earlier, and the expiry could only be seen in the fine print after the packaging was opened. The ACCC’s guidance on cash back offers, gifts and prizes is that the packaging is misleading, because the bold representation was made without clear mention of the limitations.
That’s a duration problem wearing a compliance costume. Stock doesn’t clear when the campaign ends. On-pack offers keep selling themselves from pantries, warehouses and the back of the shelf long after the media stops — which is the argument for treating 90 days as a floor rather than a ceiling, and for checking how long the point-of-purchase display stays up relative to the offer printed on it.
The fulfilment tail carries its own obligation. The same ACCC guidance makes it unlawful to offer a prize or gift and then fail to provide it as offered, or fail to provide it within the time specified — or, where no time is specified, within a reasonable time. An unstated fulfilment tail isn’t a neutral omission. It hands someone else the job of deciding what “reasonable” means.
What the permit calendar does to your start date
Duration has a hard floor at the front as well, and it’s the one that most often surprises people.
In New South Wales, an authority is required when the total prize value for a single trade promotion exceeds $10,000. Where an authority applies, NSW Fair Trading requires a copy of the gaming rules at least 10 working days before the promotion takes place, and the activity cannot commence until that notification has been given. Two working weeks, sitting in front of your start date, before anything goes live. The rules sit under the Community Gaming Act 2018.
The back end is regulated too. Under the same NSW guidance, if the rules don’t state a timeframe for an activity requiring an authority, the operator must keep an unclaimed prize for at least three months before a new winner can be drawn. Your promotion has a tail whether or not you wrote one. The only choice is whether you set it or inherit it.
Thresholds and processes differ across the states, which is a separate planning exercise — we’ve covered the detail in our guide to competition permits in Australia.
Three dates, set on purpose
Pick the mechanic, then let the mechanic set the calendar. Close entry on the last day of sale for a draw. Hold a cashback open about 90 days past it, longer if the offer is on-pack. Decide which kind of gift with purchase you’re running before you date it at all. Then write the fulfilment tail into the terms as a stated number of days, because it exists whether or not you name it.
The claim window is the only one of the three that is simultaneously a customer-experience decision, a compliance position and a line in the budget. It is usually the one nobody owns. None of this costs anything while it’s still a date in a planning document, and all of it is expensive afterwards, because by then the packs are printed.
If you’d like a second opinion on your dates before that, talk to us.
