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.
