Most competition briefs arrive with the prize already settled. The car, the trip, the $50,000 — that part is decided before anyone picks up the phone to us. What’s usually still open, and treated as a detail to tidy up later, is how someone proves they bought the product.
That detail is the mechanic.
Almost nobody actually decides this
We have 63 campaigns on file at Trevor Services. 6 are internal test builds, which leaves 57 real ones. Of those 57, 53 require a receipt. 4 don’t. Not one has run on unique on-pack codes — the only code-based record in the system is a test.
That is not the output of 57 separate decisions. It’s a default, inherited from the last promotion the brand ran, which inherited it from the one before that. And it’s worth interrogating, because the ask is heavier than the brief makes it sound: keep a piece of paper you would normally bin, find it again later, photograph it well enough to be legible, and upload it. That’s four steps, and three of them happen away from the point of sale, hours or days after the shopper saw the promotion.
Now the part that complicates the obvious conclusion. Across the 45 receipt-based campaigns with a recorded entry count, the median took 379 entries. The 4 campaigns that don’t require a receipt landed at 1,491, 1,018, 266 and 67 — two above that median, two below it, which is to say no pattern at all. That isn’t a controlled comparison, and distribution differences swamp everything else in a sample that size. But if removing the biggest source of friction in the entry journey were the lever people assume it is, you would expect to see something. There’s nothing there.
Remove the receipt and you don’t automatically get volume. You just get less information about the volume you got.
What is a purchase-to-enter competition?
A purchase-to-enter competition is a promotion where buying a participating product is a condition of entry: the entrant submits proof — a photo of the receipt, or a unique code printed on or inside the pack — and that proof is validated before the entry goes into the draw. In Australia these run as trade promotions, and unlike US sweepstakes law, there is no general requirement to offer a free alternative entry route.
Which is part of why the decision gets skipped. When the law doesn’t force you to justify the purchase requirement, nobody in the room does either.
What the receipt actually buys you
Friction is a cost, not a sin. It buys something, and what it buys is attribution: every entry attached to a real transaction, which is the only honest way a competition can claim it moved units rather than moved attention. Drop the receipt and the entry file becomes a list of people who were interested. Keep it and the file becomes a list of people who bought, with the store, the date and the basket attached.
So the question isn’t how to reduce friction. It’s whether the thing this friction buys is the thing this promotion is for. If the job is trial or incremental volume, proof of purchase is load-bearing, and you should budget the validation work properly rather than discovering it in week two. If the job is reach or data capture, a purchase condition is filtering out precisely the people you were trying to find, and you’re paying for an attribution trail you’ll never open.
One caution on the validation side, since it’s the part that surprises clients: receipt checking is operational work that starts the day entries open, not the day the draw closes. You’re reading photographs of thermal-printed dockets that arrive creased, cropped, blurred, or half a metre long. Automated receipt validation handles the bulk and flags the outliers, but there is always a human queue behind it, and the campaigns that go badly are the ones that budgeted for a prize and forgot to budget for that.
Codes are better than receipts, and nobody runs them
A unique code printed on or inside the pack is the better mechanic, and it isn’t close — but not for the reason usually given. It’s not that codes are an easier ask; on our own numbers, making entry easier doesn’t reliably buy entries. It’s that a code ties the entry to a specific unit rather than to a transaction, which is a different and better piece of data: you know what was bought, not just that something was. And a properly generated code set is far harder to attack than a receipt image, which is the softest surface in promotional fraud — photographs get shared, reused and edited, and there is no version of a receipt promotion where that isn’t being attempted.
53 receipt campaigns, zero code campaigns. That gap says nothing about the mechanics and everything about when promotions get signed off. Codes need artwork changes, a print run and packs on shelf, which means the decision has to be made months before the campaign goes live. Receipts need none of that, so receipts are what you get when the promotion is approved in the same quarter it runs.
Which makes the most useful question in the whole conversation an unglamorous one: when are the packs being printed? If the answer is “they’ve been printed”, codes are off the table and you’re running receipts whether you prefer them or not. Worth establishing before the mechanic goes into a client presentation as a recommendation.
How many entries should you expect?
Nobody can tell you, and anyone quoting you a benchmark off the top of their head is guessing. Two comparable receipt-based draws from our file: a Grant Burge AFL Grand Final promotion through a single retail banner over five weeks this July took 1,775 entries against a prize pool just over $29,000; a Jacob’s Creek Australian Open promotion, four weeks over the 2025 summer, took 1,549 against a $14,000 pool. Similar shape, similar result — which looks like a benchmark until you set it against the median of 379 across all 45 campaigns with a recorded count. The distribution of outcomes is wide, and the entry mechanic is not what’s driving the width.
Distribution, prize relevance and shelf visibility do far more of the work — whether the prize means anything to that category’s shopper matters more than whether you asked for a receipt. It’s why Trudy, our predictive platform, compares a proposed promotion against past campaigns of a similar shape rather than against a category average. The useful question isn’t “what’s a good entry rate”. It’s “what happened last time someone ran this, in this category, at this distribution”.
When a free entry route earns its place
Since Australia doesn’t require one, treat it as a design choice. It earns its place when the promotion’s job is data or awareness rather than sales, and when the product is bought too infrequently for a competition to plausibly cause the purchase.
The second case is the one people get backwards. Nobody buys a fridge because there’s a competition on, so the instinct is to drop the purchase requirement and open it up. In practice the opposite is right. On a considered purchase the promotion works as a nudge at the decision point and a reason to register afterwards, and the receipt requirement fits neatly around a purchase that was going to happen or not on its own merits. The largest file we hold is exactly this: Electrolux’s always-on gift-with-purchase program, receipt-validated, 18,432 claims since 2019. Nobody bought an oven to get the bonus, but plenty of people who were already buying one registered — and every one of those registrations is attached to a product and a store. Open the same offer to people who haven’t bought anything and the extra names are, mostly, people who were never going to.
Two compliance points sit alongside this, and neither turns on whether entry requires a purchase — permits are triggered by prize value. In NSW an authority is required once total prize value exceeds $10,000, under the Community Gaming Regulation 2020. In the ACT the threshold is $3,000, administered by the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission. In South Australia it’s $5,000, and Consumer and Business Services won’t let you advertise until the licence number is issued — a scheduling problem more than a legal one, and it catches people every year. Our competition permits guide has the state-by-state detail. Separately, the ACCC is explicit that you can’t tell people buying a product will win them a prize when what they’re getting is a chance to win one. That’s usually a copy problem rather than a mechanic problem, and it usually enters late, via whoever writes the shelf talker.
The version that goes wrong
The prize is chosen first. The entry requirement is inherited from last year. Nobody checks whether the two are pulling in the same direction, so the promotion ends up carrying the attribution burden of a sales campaign and the entry volume of an awareness one — the One Job Rule, our name for picking a single objective and building to it, broken at the entry form rather than at the prize, which is where people usually look for it.
If you want a second opinion on how to structure entry for something you’re planning, we’re happy to talk it through.
Though most of it comes down to two questions you can answer without us: what is this promotion actually for, and when are the packs being printed.
