I’ve heard over the years a lot of different type “call and win” contests on the radio. One I always liked was the birthday game where they randomly pick a month and day (e.g. April-17) and if it’s your birthday and you’re caller #10 you win $1000. Not too bad of odds, 1 in 365, then you call in trying to beat out the other locals who have the same birthday.
So I hear another one today that sounds similar. They pick 4 random numbers in sequence and if they match the last 4 numbers of any credit card you own you win $50,000. A bit tougher odds here being 1 in 10,000 but the prize is bigger.
So I’m thinking what the heck, I’ll pull out my cards and if any of them happen to match the 1 in 10,000 odds I’ll try to call in.
Hold on a sec… Apparently it doesn’t work that way.
Before they draw the numbers people try to call in to play. They pick one person. They put that person on the air. One person plays. That’s it.
So one person, once a day, gets the 1 in 10,000 chance of winning:rolleyes:.
WTF kind of contest is that? Apparently one where they are pretty much assured to never have to pay out. Lame. They might as well have someone call and and “guess the secret number between 1 and 10,000!!!”
Um, 1729?
Oh, so close! It was 8032!!
It’s $50,000. Did you think they could give this away every single day and remain in business? No. So this has to be a one time win. But if you asked everyone in the metro area to call in if they matched, the game would be over on the first day. They want to milk this for as long as they can, to get as many listeners as they can. And if the contest lasts for less than a month, the station execs will be sorely disappointed.
By the way, if you can use as many credit cards as you have, the odds aren’t 1/10,000, but (approximately) 1/10,000*the number of cards you own.
They had the same kind of thing here in Denver but the odds were even worse. They’d call 1 person a day, and they’d have to match the last 4 of their drivers license number. At least with credit cards, you might have more than one. They called it the “snowballs chance in hell” contest. At least they were honest about your chances. As far as I know, no one won.
Personally, I’m kind of enjoying the unintentionally hilarious small town local radio where I currently live. It has all the ham-fisted unprofessionalism that you’d expect, of course (dead air, stumbling over strange words like “vacancy” while reading the news). When the locals get on the horn to guess the answer to the trivia question, the awesomeness ramps up to eleven!
“One in four people in the USA has done this”
Caller 1: “graduated high school?” (no, not talking about this town, where that does seem likely, albeit a little high)
Caller 2:“started their own business?” (OK, that seems feasible but apparently was not the right answer)
Caller 3: “Go into space?” (Yes, seventy five million Americans have hopped aboard the space shuttle…)
This went on for weeks, with 6 callers a day until someone guessed “Appear on TV”, which I suspect they made up just to put this contest out of it’s misery.
My favorite moment was when the DJ answered with “Hello! you’re caller number three!” and the guy on the other end launched into some weird screaming about some sort of conspiracy theory that the media needed to report the TRUTH about, man!
I’d like to think that people are doing this for a lark, but based on my day to day interactions with locals, it’s quite sincere.
Those “snowball in hell contests” really are shitty - what’s the point? At least here you can win an ice cream cake with your photo on it! Wheee!
It beats the contest around here. You have to go to a sponsor’s store and pick up a sign to put in your back car window. Then one of their employees will see a car with the sign and tell the announcer to call your plate number. Then you have 5 minutes to call them, Then there’s some odds like a wheel of fortune thing. But all the while hundreds of people are carrying free ads around town for the sponsor store.
You may want to rethink the birthday game as well. How often do you hear the date 31 come out? Like never? They had it in my old town and it simply never was drawn- I believe because it automatically precluded a few months. So if you were born on the 31 st- tough luck.
As long as you don’t have any with a duplicate last 4 digits, the odds are the number of cards you have / 10,000.
If you have 10 cards, you at least have a 1 / 1,000 chance. For $50,000 those are pretty decent odds if you are the person who gets to play, but I agree that it’s still a shitty contest.
The birthday one on our local radio is done the opposite to yours. Once they have lucky caller #ten on the line they “spin the wheel” and ask the caller if their birthday is the date that “spins” up. As you can imagine, this prize doesn’t exactly go off weekly… and isn’t anything in the vicinity of $50k.
Yea, sounds like the old draft system if they would have applied it correctly. Be a great marketing campaign for a station. Get drafted on 86.6!! We’ll tag you and send you on shoreleave with a grand to blow.
Otherwise, it sounds like a spin on the big wheel.
I hate and despise that sort of “trivia” question, one where there might be hundreds of perfectly correct answers, but unless you get the one they are looking for, you’re “wrong”.
A couple of years ago, a TV watchdog censured a show called Quizmania, in which contestants had to call in and guess the various items that might be found in a woman’s handbag. Correct answers won prizes.
Among the 13 correct answers eventually supplied by the show’s host were false teeth, dog biscuits, a balaclava helmet, and a set of rawl plugs.
If the credit-card contest was done live, it would be fun as a contestant to say – yay! I won! Of course they would find out within a few minutes that you were lying, but that’s plenty of time for the station marketing wizards to crap their pants full.
That’s pretty bad odds. How about this game my morning drive used to play (it’s been a while) called “The Answer is Meat”. They’d give away tickets or a hundred bucks or something small. The DJ would pick up on caller 10 and the whole on-air crew would yell “The Answer is Meat!” and then they’d ask something like “What is the number one foodstuff consumed on the 4th of July?”
Sometimes they’d go hours before they got the right answer.
