The ten best competitions of 2017

This week I’ve been asking SuperLucky readers which competitions and prize draws impressed them most this year – and which didn’t live up to expectations. Our list covers photo competitions, on-pack promotions and mobile apps – and these were chosen because not only were they fun to enter, but there was also a really good chance of winning a prize! Here’s our 2017 top ten prize promotions…

1. Walkers Snap and Share

Snap and Share sounded like a crazy idea for a competition – ask people to hold a crisp packet in front of their faces for a selfie, and then post it on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter with #WalkersUnited every day for two months? But what a fantastic chance of winning a prize – in total 500 PS4s were given away, plus 40 pairs of Champions League match tickets and thousands of footballs. In addition to the main promo, there was a Tesco exclusive with 250 more PS4 prizes which meant some entrants actually won TWO PS4s, one in each promotion! The ‘Win a Pay Packet’ promotion later in the year wasn’t as well received, with the chance of winning a cash prize rather slim (although the 1-in-3 odds of winning a free multipack voucher was great!)

2. Ambrosia

Ambrosia celebrated their 100th anniversary with a year’s worth of prizes (1200 in total) ranging from recipe books to holidays. Entrants uploaded a photo featuring Ambrosia to the website and winners were chosen at random each month. This one is still running until 20th December!

3. Personalised KitKats

KitKat’s fun promotion gave winners the ultimate gift, a KitKat bar personalised with a photo and message! With 1,000 up for grabs each day this was easy to win, and you could win 10 bars per person – I’m sure lots of these were given out on Mothers Day and Fathers Day this year!

4. Krispy Kreme 80 Years of Smiles

Like Ambrosia, Krispy Kreme celebrated their birthday with a generous promotion, giving away 1200 vouchers for a dozen doughnuts. Entrants had to upload a smiling group photo to Instagram or Twitter using #80yearsofsmiles. 25 winners were chosen at random every day and rewarded with a voucher. A cheap and easy prize to send out,  the competition resulted in loads of delighted tweets from winners collecting their prize in store!

5. Cadbury Stadium

Whereas ‘Match & Win’ was almost impossible to win (Swansea beating Chelsea 6-5, anyone?) the Cadbury Stadium promotion was almost impossible to lose! Rather than unique codes, this promotion required just a Cadbury batch code (and later, a bar code) so the same details could be entered every day. Entering codes from the product of the week gave you double the chance of winning instantly and inboxes were soon overflowing with ‘congratulations’ emails, mainly for free chocolate bar vouchers but also lots of Premier league tickets too. The only downside was trying to nab tickets for your favourite team: if you didn’t respond to your winners email by clicking immediately you were likely to end up with Brighton tickets (I’m not complaining – two kind friends have passed their unwanted prize tickets on to me!) Cadbury have a new Win a Legend instant win promo starting in January so let’s hope that one is as good.

6. Faces for Florida

As featured in my 2016 best promotions list, Faces for Florida returned this year with a slightly easier task. For four weeks in January, Heart London gave away a holiday for 4 to Florida every weekday on the breakfast show. Entrants had to take a fun photo, then add stickers of Jamie Theakston and Emma Bunton to it online. The twenty creative winners were rewarded with amazing prizes that included attraction tickets, flights, accommodation and spending money (check out this year’s winning photos on the SuperLucky Facebook page). I’ve heard rumours that FFF will return for 2018 too – better get your thinking caps on!

7. Cheerios

Cheerios actually ran TWO amazingly generous promotions this year: in summer they gave away 25,000 stripy bowls, and currently it’s 30,000 Star Wars breakfast prizes! Both promos are ‘winning moment’ instant wins, using a unique code inside the cereal box.

8. Lucozade Made to Move

Made to Move is a clever app from Lucozade which you sync with your Fitbit, Activity tracker or Apple Health app. As you walk or run, the app updates with your step count. During the main promotion, when you reached 5,000 steps in a day you could enter the daily prize draw (with 200 prizes!). Manage 5,000 steps for 3 days in a week and you also got a chance to win the weekly grand prize, which ranged from Australian holidays to sporting event tickets. The perfect incentive to get fit – and the app is still offering weekly prizes too!

9. Win Plenty of Prizes

‘Plenty of Prizes’ required a purchase of Plenty kitchen roll at Tesco – then entrants could input the unique code from the packaging online to enter weekly prize draws. The website featured a house which you could explore to choose the prize you wanted to enter for, with prizes ranging from kids bikes to toasters and £100 Tesco gift cards. It was a fun way to make a prize draw more exciting, and with 72 prizes per week, plenty of us were winners!

10. KFC/Pepsi

A Champions League comp for smartphone users, to enter you used the Pepsi Max app to ‘scan’ Sergio Aguero’s face on a KFC Pepsi cup. Instant win daily prizes were TVs, with a grand prize draw to win UCL Final tickets.

…and the WORST competitions of 2017?

Misleading instant win promotions got us angry earlier this year – my blog post caught the attention of the BBC, who invited me on air to talk about T&Cs and flashy advertising campaigns by the likes of McCain and Onken. The huge prize funds that some promoters shout about are misleading to the average consumer (who’s not as clued up as us compers!). Those thousands of advertised prizes will all be awarded ONLY if every single promotional code is entered on the website – so in most cases we can expect less than 5% of the prizes to be claimed.

I think most of us would agree that the McCain Great Village Raffle was the worst prize promotion of 2017. It doesn’t actually end until January 2018 – but as yet I’ve still not heard of a single winner, despite there being 28,515 prizes advertised on pack (a whopping £3million worth!)

Two other instant win promotions which left a sour taste this year were from Jarlsberg and Onken. Jarlsberg offered 1032 prizes (advertised as £50,000 worth) in their promotion, but the winners list featured just 25 names meaning only 2.4% of the advertised prizes were awarded – and it seems that many of these were only low value voucher prizes too! The promotion was almost exactly the same format as their £100,000 promotion, which featured in my list of last year’s worst comps!

Onken yogurt pots advertised 50,000 Nutribullets to be won – but the winners list featured just 400 names – just 1.25% of the advertised prizes. Although I can’t be too angry with Onken – they redeemed themselves later in the year with their Win a Yougurt promotion, giving away 50 personalised yogurts every day via a fabulous website which created an adorable video showing your yogurt being created.

And that’s it for my list of 2017’s best and worst prize promotions! Leave a comment to let me know which were your favourites this year – and how many of these top ten promotions did YOU win a prize in?