In winter 2026 Grant Burge ran two promotions for the same wine, in the same season, tied to the same football finals — and they weren’t the same promotion. The Liquorland execution topped out at a $10,000 AFL prize pack.. The BWS execution then went live a few weeks later. Same brand, same wine, same finals series, two different retailers, two different prize structures built to fit them. Neither was a national campaign that happened to run through both chains. Each was built for the retailer it ran in.

That’s the part most marketing teams skip. The instinct is to design one promotion for the shopper, then take it to every retailer at once as a fait accompli. But a national mechanic pitched identically to Coles, Woolworths, BWS and Liquorland on the same day is usually the weaker pitch, not the more efficient one — because none of those category managers experience it as “built for me.” They experience it as “built for the brand’s media plan, and I happened to be in the distribution list.”

What the retailer is actually weighing up

In The Shelf Truth, we call the person making that call the Gatekeeper, and it’s worth being precise about what they’re actually assessing, because it’s rarely “is this a good idea.” A category manager’s job is to grow their category’s sales without creating operational headaches, and a promotion is one of dozens of things competing for their attention in any given trading period. Ranged, a retail consultancy that advises suppliers pitching Coles and Woolworths, is explicit that the commercial plan needs to cover RRP, promotional plan and marketing funding in the same document — not as a range-and-pricing conversation now and a promotional afterthought later. If your promotional plan only shows up after the listing terms are settled, you’ve already told the buyer it’s an afterthought for you too.

The Gatekeeper isn’t just weighing upside, either. They’re weighing what happens if it goes wrong — a receipt validation process that generates complaints, a prize draw that runs into a compliance question, a mechanic staff in-store can’t explain to a customer standing at the counter. None of that shows up in the concept deck. It shows up in the operational detail, which is exactly the part most pitches rush through to get to the creative.

What is the S.O.S. Framework?

The S.O.S. Framework pressure-tests a promotion pitch against the three things a retailer actually cares about, in the order they actually care about them: is it Simple enough for staff and shoppers to understand at a glance, is it Operationally sound enough not to create problems in-store, and does it demonstrably drive Sales rather than just look clever. Bamboo Marketing has written the fuller version of the framework and how to build a pitch deck around it; the part worth adding from the delivery side is what happens to each of those three letters once the promotion actually has to run in a store.

Simple is a design decision, but it’s tested in the store, not the deck — a mechanic that needs explaining gets misrepresented at point of sale, and a category manager who’s been burned by a confusing promotion once remembers it for a long time. Operational is the one most pitches under-cook, because “will this work across a chain of stores with casual staff on a Saturday morning” is a different question from “will shoppers like it,” and it’s usually the question your own team has spent the least time answering before the meeting. Sales is where a live promotion either proves the first two were solid or exposes that they weren’t — which is the argument for building the proof into the mechanic itself rather than promising it in advance.

Why the Grant Burge numbers aren’t a coincidence

Start with the honest part of the gap: BWS had more than five times Liquorland’s prize pool to work with, and it cost roughly $474 to fund each winner there against $284 at Liquorland — a bigger, more expensive execution by design, reflecting BWS’s own scale in that client’s national account plan. No framework changes that. But the more interesting decision is what BWS did with the extra budget, because it didn’t just make the same prize bigger — it funded five times as many winners at the small-reward tier, and a BWS entrant’s odds of winning anything ended up roughly three times better than a Liquorland entrant’s on a near-identical number of entries. That’s the Rule of Three at work: a promotion where about one in seven people walks away with something feels winnable in a way a promotion with a handful of big winners and not much else doesn’t, and a category manager who’s watched a promotion over-promise on “everyone’s a winner” messaging notices the difference between a campaign that can actually deliver that feeling and one that only claims to. The budget explains the scale. It doesn’t explain the shape — and the shape is the part a brand actually chooses.

This is also where measurement earns its place in the pitch rather than turning up afterwards. The Australian Grocery Distributors industry body puts it plainly: major supermarkets now expect suppliers to bring data-sharing tools and insights platforms to the relationship, not just a promotion, and says that pressure lands hardest on suppliers without a track record to fall back on. That’s the gap Trudy is built to close — not to make the pitch deck look more sophisticated, but because a category manager who approves a promotion wants to check on it mid-flight rather than wait six weeks for a wrap-up report, and a brand that can show real entry and redemption numbers while the promotion is live is doing some of the trust-building a longer retailer relationship would otherwise have to do on its own.

The mechanic decision and the approval decision are the same conversation

Of the promotions we’ve run, just over half use a straightforward entry mechanic rather than anything more mechanically complex — not because brands lack ambition, but because simplicity is what a category manager can say yes to quickly. A cashback or a gift-with-purchase asks more of a retailer’s systems and shelf-edge signage than a straightforward draw entry does, and that’s before you get to collect-to-win or multi-step conditionals, which read well in a strategy deck and considerably less well to a store manager briefing casual staff.

None of that means the simplest mechanic always wins — the One Job Rule still applies, and a promotion built to grow basket size needs a different mechanic to one built to drive trial. What it means is that the mechanic decision and the retailer-approval decision are the same conversation, not two separate ones. Choose the mechanic for the shopper alone, without asking whether a category manager can picture it running cleanly across their stores, and you’ve solved half the problem and left the other half to be discovered in the pitch meeting — usually the hard way.

The Grant Burge campaigns cleared two different retailers in the same season because each pitch was built around that retailer’s own shopper and store reality — budget included — not around a single national concept asking two different Gatekeepers to say yes to the same thing. Before the next pitch meeting, not during it, the question worth answering isn’t “will shoppers like this.” It’s “would this specific category manager, looking at their own stores and their own risk, actually say yes” — and if the honest answer is “only if we changed three things,” those are the three things to fix before the meeting, not after it stalls. We help brands run that check before it matters; here’s where to start if that’s useful.

Put two promotions side by side and they can offer roughly the same value and still ask something completely different of the shopper. One says: buy this, enter, and you might win a car. The other says: buy this, send us the receipt, and we’ll give you $30 back. Same budget, same category, same shelf — but one is selling hope and the other is selling a small, certain gain. We build both kinds of promotion at Trevor Services, and the difference in how people respond to them isn’t marginal. It’s the whole design brief.

The two pilots: hope and greed

In The Shelf Truth, Mark Alexander and Amelia Speechley call this the Two Pilots — the Gambler and the Accountant sitting in the shopper’s head, and every promotional mechanic is really an argument aimed at one of them. The Gambler wants dopamine: a shot at something disproportionate to what they paid, decided by luck rather than effort. Instant wins, prize draws and sweepstakes are built for the Gambler. The Accountant wants certainty: a known, calculable return for a known action. Cashback and gift-with-purchase are built for the Accountant. Neither pilot is wrong, and neither is more sophisticated than the other — they’re just different shoppers, or the same shopper on different days, depending on what they’ve already got riding on the outcome of their week.

What’s interesting is that the Accountant’s certainty isn’t as unemotional as it sounds. A Journal of Marketing Research analysis of more than 3.4 million transactions across roughly 5,300 retailers, covered by Retail Times, found that shoppers who received cashback went on to spend around 32 cents of every rebated dollar — evidence of what researchers call mental accounting: people file a rebate as new, separate money rather than folding it back into their original budget. Cashback doesn’t feel like getting money back. It feels like earning it. That’s the Accountant’s version of a dopamine hit — smaller, calmer, but real.

Why some brands try to give the shopper both

The One Job Rule says a promotion should do one thing: pick a single objective — trial, frequency, basket size, data, or loyalty — and build the mechanic around it. It’s good advice, and most promotions that fail are failing because they tried to be three campaigns wearing one hero image. But there’s a specific case that looks like it breaks the rule and doesn’t: a prize structure that pairs one or two large, low-probability prizes with a much larger pool of smaller, higher-probability ones. Mark and Amelia call this the Dopamine Sandwich — a headline prize for the Gambler, wrapped around frequent smaller wins for the Accountant.

This isn’t the same as running a cashback offer and a sweepstake side by side and hoping the shopper picks a lane. It’s still one mechanic, with one entry mechanism and one objective — the tiering is inside the prize pool, not the promotion’s structure. Vinarchy’s Grant Burge AFL Grand Final promotion through independent retailers this year is a clean, literal example of the shape: a $23,284 Grand Final travel package for two, with exactly one winner, sitting above a tier of 154 separate $50 AFL Store eGift cards — a $30,984 pool in total, and by the time the draw closed, all 154 of the smaller prizes had been claimed against the single major prize. The big prize does the recruiting. The large, low-value tier is what makes the odds feel worth the entry once the shopper is actually standing at the shelf doing the maths — a shopper who enters knows their real odds are closer to 1-in-5 for the eGift tier than 1-in-704 for the trip, because both numbers are sitting in the same prize pool. The logic is the Rule of Three — one prize reads as “impossible,” a handful reads as “possible,” and a tier of over a hundred reads as “probable enough to be worth my five minutes.” A promotion that only offers the impossible odds is relying entirely on the Gambler showing up.

Most brands default to the single hero prize anyway, and it’s worth being honest about why: it’s the easier internal sell. A trip to the AFL Grand Final makes a better slide than a grid of $50 vouchers, and it’s the image that gets a promotion approved by a category manager who’s looking at a deck, not living inside the entry data afterwards. That’s a real reason to lead with the big prize. It isn’t a reason to leave the Accountant’s tier as an afterthought — the promotions that pull real volume tend to be the ones where someone fought for the boring tier too, not just the one that looks good on the brief.

Where this goes wrong is when brands use the Dopamine Sandwich as cover for not deciding. If the headline prize, the participation tier and the entry mechanic are each trying to serve a different objective — trial for one, data capture for another, loyalty for a third — that’s not a Dopamine Sandwich, that’s three campaigns in a trench coat, and it usually shows up later as a promotion nobody can explain simply to a retailer or a compliance reviewer.

Where hope becomes a legal category, not just a design choice

The distinction between hope and greed isn’t only a psychology question anymore. The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, which is due to commence on 1 January 2027 if it passes, narrows the federal exemption that currently lets trade promotions run prize draws without being treated as gambling. The reform is aimed at businesses where the customer is really paying for a chance to win — a subscription or membership fee that exists mainly to fund recurring draws for high-value prizes — rather than paying for goods or services with a promotional entry attached. A standard “buy the product, get an entry” mechanic isn’t the target. But it’s a reminder that the further a promotion leans toward pure Gambler appeal — low odds, high value, minimal connection to an actual purchase — the closer it sits to a line regulators are actively redrawing.

That’s a strategic argument for the Dopamine Sandwich structure as much as a psychological one. A prize pool that’s mostly a large tier of achievable, purchase-linked rewards, with a smaller number of aspirational prizes on top, reads unambiguously as a trade promotion attached to a purchase. A prize pool that’s almost entirely one enormous, low-odds prize starts to look more like the thing the Bill is trying to separate out. Worth factoring in at the design stage, not after legal review.

What is the Dopamine Sandwich in promotional marketing?

The Dopamine Sandwich is a prize pool structure that pairs a small number of high-value, low-probability prizes — aimed at the Gambler’s appetite for a disproportionate win — with a much larger tier of smaller, higher-probability prizes that give the Accountant a realistic, calculable reason to enter. It’s one mechanic with tiered odds, not two mechanics run in parallel.

Deciding which pilot you’re flying for

None of this replaces the basics. The 3-Second Equation still governs whether the offer is worth the shopper’s attention at all, and the Insult Threshold still applies if the “certain” prize in your Accountant tier is too small to be worth the effort of claiming it. What the Hope-versus-Greed framing adds is an earlier, cheaper question: before you argue about prize values or entry mechanics, decide honestly which pilot this promotion is actually flying for, and whether that’s the same pilot your last three promotions flew for. A brand that’s run five consecutive instant-win campaigns has been talking to the Gambler for a year and hasn’t said a word to the Accountant. That’s not a mechanic problem. It’s a strategy gap — and it’s usually the brand that never has to ask “did that promotion actually work, or did it just feel exciting to launch” that’s been making it.

We’ve watched the Accountant’s tier get cut from a brief late, almost as an afterthought, more often than we’ve watched it get cut on purpose. If that’s happening on your next promotion, it’s worth asking why before the brief is locked, not after the entry numbers come in lower than the big prize deserved.

In Trevor’s own campaign records, one whitegoods client — Electrolux — has been running variations of the same cashback mechanic since 2020: receipt upload, OCR validation against the model number, PayID payout. Same claim flow, same terms and conditions skeleton, same fulfilment configuration behind the scenes, campaign after campaign. What changes each time is the offer, the products in scope, and the creative wrapped around it. Nobody on that account is trying to reinvent the promotion every cycle, and the mechanic keeps doing its job.

That’s not a lack of imagination. It’s a decision, and it’s one more Australian marketing teams could make deliberately instead of by accident. Most promotions get treated as a fresh problem every time a campaign brief lands — new mechanic, new legal review, new permit application, new brief to the fulfilment partner — when a large share of that work was already solved the last time a similar promotion ran.

Where the money in a promotion actually goes

Ask most marketing managers what a promotion costs and they’ll start with the prize pool. That’s rarely where the real spend sits. Legal review of terms and conditions, permit applications where they’re required, briefing a fulfilment partner on entry validation and fraud controls, testing the claim or entry flow, and getting sign-off from compliance and finance all happen before a single shopper sees the campaign — and most of that work is close to identical to the promotion the same brand ran twelve months earlier.

The prize is a line item. The process around it is the actual cost centre, and it’s the part that gets rebuilt from nothing every time a team treats each promotion as a one-off creative exercise rather than an execution of a proven mechanic.

What is a promotion mechanic template?

A promotion mechanic template is the reusable operational skeleton behind a promotion — the entry flow, terms and conditions structure, compliance documentation, and fulfilment configuration — kept consistent across campaigns while the creative, prize, and offer change each time. At Trevor Services, this is what sits behind a client’s Salesforce-native campaign setup: the mechanic is configured once and re-run, rather than rebuilt from a blank page for every brief.

This is different from running the exact same promotion twice. The dressing changes completely — new hero product, new prize, new media plan, new headline. What stays fixed is the machinery: how an entry is captured, how a claim is validated, how a winner is selected and paid, and what the terms and conditions need to say to hold up under each state’s trade promotion rules.

The compliance system already assumes you’ll do this again

This isn’t a shortcut Trevor invented. It’s built into how trade promotion permits actually work. In NSW, an authority is required once the total prize value exceeds $10,000, and that authority can be issued for one, three or five years — covering multiple promotions run under it, not just the one that triggered the application. A brand that promotes regularly pays that setup cost once and reuses it, rather than starting the approval process from zero each time.

South Australia and the ACT price permits by prize pool tier rather than duration — a $10,000 prize pool in SA sits around $261 standard, while a $200,000-plus pool in the ACT runs to roughly $4,278, according to the current fee schedule published by Anisimoff. Processing itself isn’t instant either — Lawpath notes permits can take two to four weeks depending on the state. None of that changes based on how creative the mechanic is. A brand that has already been through the process, with terms and conditions that have already survived a compliance review, is starting several weeks ahead of a brand doing it for the first time.

Trevor uses a 15-minute diagnostic called the Kill Sheet to pressure-test a promotion idea before it goes anywhere near a brief. The question most teams skip when they’re excited about a new mechanic is exactly this one: is the idea worth the weeks of legal and compliance lead time it will cost, when a mechanic that’s already cleared could be live sooner and tested with real data instead of assumptions?

It’s also worth looking at what’s actually running in the Australian market right now rather than guessing. In the live promotions we track across FMCG, liquor, appliances and general retail, prize draws and instant win mechanics turn up far more often than cashback, gift-with-purchase or collect-to-win combined. Some of that is genuine mechanic fit. A lot of it is simpler than that: a single prize draw is the easiest structure to get permitted and the easiest one to explain in a one-page brief, so it’s what gets defaulted to when nobody has a proven alternative sitting on the shelf. That’s reuse too — it’s just reuse by habit rather than by decision, and it means most of the market is already doing a worse version of exactly what this article is arguing for.

Where reuse breaks down

None of this means every promotion should look like the last one. Reuse fails in a couple of specific ways, and it’s worth being honest about both.

The first is audience overlap. If the same customer base sees the same mechanic every quarter, the entry experience starts to feel routine rather than exciting, and a mechanic that once felt like a genuine chance to win starts to read as background noise. This matters most for high-frequency categories with a small, repeat-purchase audience — it matters much less for a brand running one promotion a year to a broad market that has mostly forgotten the last one by the time the next one launches.

The second is a change in the One Job. A cashback mechanic that worked well for driving basket size doesn’t automatically work for a campaign whose actual job is trial among people who’ve never bought the category before. Reusing the mechanic because it’s familiar, without checking it still matches this campaign’s job, is how a perfectly good template gets used for the wrong reason. The operational skeleton can stay the same; the decision about which mechanic to reuse still has to be made fresh every time.

What this looks like in practice

In practice, this usually looks like a short list rather than a single template: two or three mechanics — a cashback flow, a prize draw structure, maybe an instant win — already built, tested and cleared through compliance, with the choice between them made fresh each time based on what the campaign’s job actually is, not out of habit. The creative team still gets a genuinely new campaign to work with. The compliance and fulfilment side just isn’t reinventing itself every quarter.

It’s also part of why Australian marketing budgets are under more scrutiny for efficiency this year — Bamboo Marketing’s read on where retail marketing spend is actually going in 2026 points in the same direction: less appetite for rebuilding the same wheel, more pressure to make repeatable systems do the heavy lifting so budget can go toward the parts of a campaign that genuinely need to be new.

None of this was ever really about creativity. It’s about which parts of a promotion actually need to be reinvented every cycle, and being honest that most of them don’t. Talk to us about which of your mechanics are worth keeping on the shelf — the budget that frees up is what pays for the part of next year’s campaign that’s actually worth being original about.

Five times the prize money bought nine per cent more entries.

That’s the Grant Burge AFL Grand Final promotion, which ran this winter through four retail channels as four separate campaigns. They sit side by side in the Trevor Services campaign file, which is the only reason the comparison is possible. BWS ran a $126,550 prize pool and closed on 1,775 entries. Liquorland ran $24,150 and closed on 1,623.

The on-premise version ran a $7,301 pool — under six per cent of what BWS put up — and closed on 1,144 entries. Roughly two thirds of the participation on a twentieth of the prize budget.

What the rest of the file looks like

We went back through every campaign on our platform at Trevor Services that has closed with entry data recorded: 57 of them, across cashback, sweepstakes, gift with purchase and standard entry mechanics. Taking the 38 closed campaigns that ran a genuine prize pool, the rank correlation between prize pool size and entry volume is 0.35. Positive, so the money isn’t doing nothing. Weak enough that if prize pool is the main number being argued over in the planning meeting, the meeting is arguing about the wrong number.

The clearest single case holds the brand constant. McGuigan ran two national promotions with almost identical prize pools — $40,900 and $43,050. One closed on 379 entries, the other on 267. Same brand, same order of prize money, a 42 per cent gap in participation. Whatever produced that difference, it wasn’t the size of the pool.

Then there is the top of the table. The three highest entry counts in our closed campaigns include an Electrolux gift-with-purchase offer that recorded 18,911 claims, a second Electrolux GWP on 3,917, and a Westinghouse offer on 3,535. All three carried a prize pool of zero.

That comparison isn’t like for like and we shouldn’t pretend it is. A GWP claim is someone collecting a guaranteed reward, not someone taking a ticket in a draw. But that’s the point rather than the caveat. Across our closed campaigns the median gift-with-purchase promotion recorded 1,288 claims; the median standard-entry promotion recorded 209 entries, and the median sweepstake 87. The mechanic that offers no chance of winning anything outperformed the mechanics built entirely on the chance of winning something, by roughly an order of magnitude.

Does a bigger prize pool get more entries?

A little, and rarely in proportion to what it costs. Across 38 closed Australian promotions with a prize pool, the rank correlation between pool size and entries was 0.35 — positive but weak, with a fifth of the prize money in one case delivering 91 per cent of the entries. Prize pool tends to set the ceiling on a promotion’s appeal rather than determine where within that ceiling it lands.

Two limits on that. This is our book, not the market: 57 closed campaigns weighted heavily towards liquor and whitegoods, which is what we run most of, and 38 is a small sample for a correlation. And channels aren’t comparable footprints — BWS has far more doors than an on-premise network, so part of that entry gap is distribution rather than persuasion. We’d argue that reinforces the finding rather than undermining it. If distribution is doing the heavy lifting, the prize pool isn’t.

What the research actually says — and what it doesn’t

The closest academic work to this question is about prize count rather than pool value, and it’s worth being precise about the difference before borrowing it. Research published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science found that consumers deciding whether to enter a sweepstake largely can’t evaluate whether the number of prizes on offer is good or bad when they see it in isolation. Within a normal range, more prizes didn’t make people feel their odds had improved, and didn’t make them more likely to enter.

That’s a finding about how many prizes, not how much they’re worth. It doesn’t prove our point. What it does is describe the mechanism that would explain it: shoppers are poor at evaluating promotional magnitude without a reference point, so the number a brand agonises over is frequently a number the shopper never really reads.

It also sits awkwardly against one of our own rules of thumb. The Rule of Three in The Shelf Truth holds that one prize reads as impossible, three reads as possible and a hundred reads as probable. On this research, that reading only happens when the shopper has something to compare against — a competing promotion on the next shelf, a familiar category norm, a visual that makes the count concrete. Absent a reference point, the number is just a number. So the practical version of the Rule of Three isn’t “put more prizes in the pool.” It’s “make the odds legible.” Those are different jobs and only one of them costs prize money.

What the file says about the alternatives

Arguing that prize pool is weak is only half an argument. The obvious question is what’s stronger, and we should answer it with the same file rather than with assertions.

The clearest lever we can see is how often someone is allowed to enter. Closed campaigns that permitted more than one entry per day recorded a median of 864 entries. Campaigns capped at one entry per day recorded a median of 185. That’s six campaigns against seventeen, so treat it as a strong hint rather than a law — but it is a design decision that costs nothing in prize money and appears to move participation further than several multiples of prize budget did.

The more useful finding is one that went against us. We expected receipt requirements to suppress entries, because friction is supposed to be the expensive term in the 3-Second Equation. It doesn’t show up that way. Campaigns requiring a receipt recorded a median of 304 entries against 36.5 for those that didn’t, and holding the mechanic constant across standard-entry promotions the two are close to indistinguishable — 198 against 266. The likely explanation is selection rather than friction: the campaigns that ask for a receipt are the funded national ones with real media behind them, and that swamps the effect we were looking for. Campaign-level data can’t isolate form friction. You need funnel data — how many people started an entry and how many finished — and that’s a different measurement. We’d rather say that than repeat a rule of thumb our own numbers don’t support.

Where the pool number stops being free

There’s also a cost curve under the prize pool that is easy to miss while the figure is being set. In New South Wales, a trade promotion authority is only required once the total value of all prizes exceeds $10,000, with application fees from $488 for a one-year authority in 2026–27. South Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory set their thresholds lower again, so a pool that clears one state’s line has usually cleared several. Crossing them is often the right call for a national campaign — it just ought to be a decision rather than something a brand backs into because a bigger number felt safer. The state-by-state detail is in the Trevor Services guide to promotional permits in Australia.

What to do with the money instead

None of this argues for a mean promotion. There is a floor, below which the reward isn’t worth the effort of claiming it, and shoppers find that floor quickly.

What the data argues against is reaching for the prize pool as the dial you turn when a promotion needs to perform better. In our file the campaigns that overperformed relative to budget were the ones offering a certain reward instead of a large one, allowing people to come back, or sitting in a channel that put them in front of more shoppers. Worth testing on the next brief, and we’re always happy to pressure-test a prize pool before it’s locked: if the pool were halved and the difference spent on distribution, entry frequency and making the odds believable, would the campaign do better or worse?

Our numbers suggest that for a lot of brands the honest answer is better, and that the question is almost never asked — because the prize pool is the easiest part of a promotion to argue about, and the hardest to be wrong about in public.

Every prize budget conversation eventually hits the same fork. Someone wants a headline prize big enough to stop the scroll, and someone else — usually finance — wants to know what happens if it’s actually won. The reflex move, almost every time, is to shrink the prize until the worst case feels affordable. That reflex is usually wrong, and the maths on sales promotion insurance is why.

In 2017, a GWS Giants member named Paul Waterhouse stepped up to Toyo Tyres’ “Kick for Cash” and put a football into a stack of tyres from the sideline, winning $100,000. Toyo didn’t respond by shrinking the prize. Within a few seasons they’d raised it to $250,000. That’s the tell: a brand that had just paid out a six-figure prize decided the economics still worked at more than double the size.

What is sales promotion insurance?

Sales promotion insurance — also called prize indemnity insurance — is a policy that pays a promotional prize on the promoter’s behalf if it’s won, priced from the odds of that happening rather than the size of the prize. It’s what let Toyo advertise $250,000 without carrying $250,000 of exposure on their own books if the kick goes in twice.

Odds On Promotions, one of the brokers active in this market, puts the typical premium at 3 to 15 percent of the prize value — the rest of the range determined by how genuinely hard the win condition is. That’s a wide band, but it’s the band that matters: on the low end, insuring a prize costs a fraction of what most marketing teams assume when they hear “insurance.”

The counter-intuitive part: bigger prizes can be proportionally cheaper

The clearest public illustration of this comes from the adjacent hole-in-one insurance market, where brokers publish rate cards rather than negotiating each policy privately. US Hole In One’s published pricing, for a field of 100 players on the same hole, shows an $8,000 prize insured for around $247 (roughly 3 percent of the prize), a $35,000 prize for around $807 (roughly 2.3 percent), and a $75,000 prize for around $1,509 (roughly 2 percent). The dollar premium climbs. The percentage of the prize it represents falls — the pattern you’d expect if part of the premium is a flat administrative loading rather than pure odds pricing, so it matters less, proportionally, once the prize is bigger. Either way, the direction is the opposite of what most marketing teams assume.

That’s the opposite of how most marketing teams intuitively price risk. The instinct is that a bigger prize is a bigger liability, so it gets trimmed under budget pressure. But if the win condition’s difficulty is held constant — the same kick, the same distance, the same card match — a bigger prize is often the cheaper one to insure per dollar of prize value, not the more expensive one. The number worth checking before you halve a prize isn’t “can we afford the payout” — it’s what the premium actually does to the percentage once the prize changes size.

Where this sits in the budget toolkit

In The Shelf Truth, we call this kind of structural thinking the Budget Hacker — using the shape of a promotion, not the media spend, to make the numbers work. Insurance sits alongside self-liquidating premiums and cashback slippage in that toolkit, but it does something the other two don’t: it removes the tail risk entirely rather than just shrinking the average cost. A cashback promotion can still blow its budget if redemption runs hotter than forecast. An insured prize draw has one number on the invoice, agreed before launch, and the insurer wears whatever happens after that — which is a different pitch to finance than “trust our forecast.”

When the maths doesn’t favour insuring

None of this makes insurance free money. The rate card logic only holds when the win condition is genuinely hard to satisfy and easy to verify — a kick from a fixed distance, a temperature threshold, a card match. A Red Lion Hotel in Adelaide ran exactly this kind of mechanic, insuring free beers triggered by the temperature crossing 45°C: external, unambiguous, and cheap to price because nobody can argue about whether it happened. A judged “most creative entry” competition is the opposite case — insurers either price the uncertainty in heavily or decline to write the policy, which is a large part of why soft, subjective mechanics rarely get insured at all. There’s also a compliance layer sitting underneath the insurance decision — permits, prize disclosure, claim validation — that we’ve walked through separately in how prize indemnity claims and permits actually work, and in more detail on the mechanic itself in how insured promotions work.

And for plenty of promotions, insurance genuinely isn’t worth the premium — a prize small enough, or a win condition easy enough, that self-funding the occasional payout costs less than the policy. That’s a real Kill Sheet question, not a rhetorical one: what does the win condition actually cost to satisfy, and does the premium beat the cost of just carrying the risk yourself. It’s also the kind of question worth running against a mechanic’s own track record rather than a gut feel — Trudy exists precisely because Trevor Services has watched enough of these mechanics play out to know which prize-to-odds combinations tend to earn their spend and which ones just look impressive in the deck.

The number worth re-running

The brands that use this well aren’t chasing the biggest prize they can get underwritten for its own sake. They’re checking whether shrinking a prize under budget pressure actually saves money, or whether it just makes the promotion less worth a shopper’s attention while the insurance line barely moves. Toyo’s answer, after paying out once, was to make the prize bigger. That’s not recklessness — it’s a brand that ran the percentage and found the bigger number was still the cheaper one to insure.

Trevor Services coordinates the execution side of insured promotions — working with the insurer, validating the win condition, and handling the payout once a claim is confirmed. If you’re deciding between a smaller prize and a bigger insured one, we’re happy to run the percentage with you.