I just bought a packet of crisps that has a promotion on the packet (“Is there a £20 note inside this pack?” Two guesses…)
Anyway, it got me thinking. Lots of products run promotions in which people who find a winning message (or even a crisp banknote!) inside the wrapper win a prize. However, to avoid falling foul of the lottery regulations, the manufacturers have to offer a “no purchase necessary” (NPN) route whereby people can send their name and address and get an equal chance of winning.
The manufacturers often say something like “Write to us with your name and address and we’ll open a pack on your behalf. We will contact you within 28 days if you are a winner.”
I always assumed that they don’t actually open a pack, just do a random drawing of all the NPN entries, but I was thinking about this the other day and realised it couldn’t work that way. Say there are 1,000 prizes to be won, so the company prints up 1,000 winning chocolate bars wrappers (or whatever). They would have to allow some extra prizes for the NPN entries - and they wouldn’t know how many because it would depend on how many people entered through the NPN route.
This leads me to conclude that they must actually open the packets. Can anyone that has worked for a company that does this confirm or deny it? And what do they do with all the opened products?
Here in the US, the rules and wording are similar, but for one difference – I’ve never seen it written that they’d actually open a real product on your behalf, and let you know if its a winner. Here, the wording is generally along the lines of “for a free game piece, write to…”. The implication is that they’ll just send you a bottle cap or whatever it is that has the winner/no-winner written on it. I’ve never actually sent for one, so I couldn’t say. I assumed they just printed x number of winning ones, had them mixed as randomly as possible with the non-winning ones, then grabbed, oh, 1000 or so from the pile to set aside to send to those who write-in (although the number they set aside would obviously be based on past contests – I assume the number of people who write-in is fairly constant).
There is another way to enter a giveaway-in-the-product without buying the product, what’s called a “Second Chance” entry. This is how my dad one a Ford Explorer a couple of years ago, and $10K a couple of years before that.
Say there are 50 Coke bottle caps out there that are “instant winners” of a new car. The vast majority of caps are NOT found. In the contest my dad entered in 2000, only two out of 50 vehicles were won by actually finding the cap. The other 48 were awarded to entrants who bothered to send a 3x5 card into the judging. IIRC, less than 5,000 people did so, among them my dad. And he sent in several hundred of those 5,000. He won the 10K cash exactly the same way in another Coke promotion a few years before.
I believe they offer to send a free game piece because there are state/city/?? that prohibits games of chance if you have to pay to play. By making you buy a soda, box of cookies, etc, it can be viewed as paying to play in a game of chance. Otherwise known as gambling.
Jim
Did this make anyone else think of the movie “Real Genius”? “They said ‘Enter as often as you like,’ so I did … I expect to win 32.7% of the prizes, including the car.”
Yep. For it to be a legal sweepstakes, they are obligated to let anybody enter. Of course, its up to the marketing department to make it look like you have to buy a product to enter, or to make your chances of winning better (see Publisher’s Clearinghouse), but legally, they’ve gotta let everybody in.
