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.

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.

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.