The ten best competitions of 2018

Which competitions and prize draws impressed you most this year – and which didn’t live up to expectations? I asked the members of my Lucky Learners Facebook group for their feedback on this year’s hits and here’s our top ten, covering creative competitions, on-pack promotions and prize draws.  Some were chosen for originality, some because they were fun to enter, and others because there was such a good chance of winning! Generally though, you’ll see that a comper’s favourite type of promotion is one which offers multiple chances to win – in hourly, daily or weekly draws, or at winning moments!

So without further ado – introducing 2018’s top ten prize promotions…

1. Pringles Take A Bite, Win a Flight

Pringles ran several promotions in 2018, but Take a Bite, Win a Flight was the favourite with my readers. Pringles awarded a prize European flight (worth up to £300) every hour from 11am – 7pm for 75 days – a total of 600 winners! To enter, all you had to do was share a photo of yourself munching on a Pringle. Winners were chosen at random each hour – if you were persistent and entered every day you had a brilliant chance of winning. Lots of SuperLucky readers were clever and also got their partners and friends to enter too, then booked their prize flights to travel together with help from Cloud Nine Incentives, who managed the prize fulfilment brilliantly.

2. Carabao Cash

Energy drinks are certainly an acquired taste, and many compers weren’t too thrilled to taste Carabao when entering the generous on-pack Carabao Cash winning moments promotion! For this one, unique codes were printed underneath the ring pulls of promotional cans – although you could turn the ring pull 180 degrees and lift with your fingernail to see the code without taking it off if you didn’t want to drink the stuff! The cans were hard to find at the start of the promotion, meaning that almost every entry was a winner. Instant cash prizes ranged from £5 up to £50,000 (two of my blog readers each won £10,000!) and were paid directly into the winner’s bank account.

3. AutoTrader Goals

As if an England match could get even more exciting, AutoTrader managed it by giving away a CAR for every goal England scored in the World Cup. All entrants had to do was post on social media with #AutoTraderGoals after a goal was scored! But AutoTrader underestimated England’s success in the tournament – by the time we were knocked out, they had given away twelve cars costing over £200,000!

4. Doritos & Pepsi Perfect Match

For the Perfect Match promotion, entrants needed to buy two Pepsi or Doritos products and pop the codes in online – BUT Pepsi codes weren’t unique, so it wasn’t necessary to keep buying new products for each entry. All prizes were awarded on a winning moments basis – top prizes were 300 TVs, then 40,000 Pepsi glass and Doritos bowl sets and thousands more coupons for free products – it was almost impossible not to win!

5. EE & Heart Family Challenge

Heart FM’s Faces for Florida creative photo competition has been in the top ten for the last two years – but although this year’s FFF was once again excellent, a new challenge was introduced in the summer that was even more fun! Heart teamed up with EE to host the #HeartFamilyChallenge – they gave a list of challenges, and entrants had to submit a photo or video taking part in them. The first competition in summer offered a huge £2,000+ technology bundle to the five winners (I was lucky enough to win one with a video of my family attempting the family flossing challenge). The Family Challenge returned in October with a Halloween theme – and then again in December with a Christmas theme and eight huge £3,000 prizes (five of which went to talented members of my Lucky Learners group). A dream promotion for creative compers!

6. Heinz win £57 every hour

Heinz gave away over £20,000 in cash prizes in their Z Factor promotion –  all that was needed was a barcode number from a specific Heinz Beanz product, and you could enter once a day. From 9am to 5pm each day there were 8 hourly draws, with a random entrant winning £57 in each one!  A simple idea and a relatively small prize – but with so many chances to win, people loved it!

7. Belvita Win a Nutribullet

For Belvita’s on pack Nutribullet promotion, all you needed was the barcode number from promotional packs to enter on their website. Each week 72 entrants were chosen at random to win a Nutribullet blender – with over a thousand prizes awarded in total, a lot of my readers got lucky with this one!

8. Amazon Santa’s Locker

Santa’s Locker returned again for 2018, and although a Treasure Hunt style promotion can never keep everyone happy because it’s location specific, it can be exciting to work out where the prize is and to get in touch with any friends you have near it! For three days in December, Amazon tweeted seven clues a day with a location and a clue to the locker name. The first person to get to the locker and put in the code won the prize inside (this year’s prizes were Kindles and Echos).

9. Freddo’s Big Adventure

Freddo’s Big Adventure was advertised in independent retailers – all that was required to enter online was the barcode number from a Cadbury Freddo (or Chomp, Fudge, or Buttons) and you could enter daily. The prizes, awarded to entries after winning moments, were ‘adventures’ ranging from zookeeper days to Go Ape sessions, supplied in the flexible form of Virgin Experience Day vouchers.

10. Doritos Win £500 every day

Pepsi and Doritos are usually pretty generous with their promotions, and for this Doritos winning moments promotion there were thousands of cash prizes up for grabs, in addition to 110,500 vouchers for a free pack of Doritos! Prizes were paid by cheque and there was no limit to the number each winner could claim. I imagine supermarket staff were relieved when this one finished, so they didn’t have to deal with any more compers waving fistfuls of coupons!

Near misses…

SuperLucky readers enjoyed the inventive Great Oreo Cookie Quest – but unfortunately too many glitches in the app meant it didn’t feature in the list.

Dairylea’s Super Cool or Super Cheesy promotion also saw a lot of winners, but a technical problem meant it took a long time for some to receive the prizes they’d won.

…and the WORST competitions of 2018?

Quaker’s Show us your oats was considered by the majority of SuperLucky readers to be the worst promotion of 2018. It started off so well, with ten generous £10,000 prizes on offer to the best porridge photos, but many felt the advertising – featuring a bowl of porridge topped with a smiley banana face – was misleading, when realistically the ten winning entries looked like professional magazine photography! It also appeared that one winner – a food stylist – had previously published her entry, which the ASA investigated. Although the ASA decided the terms had not been breached, Kellogg’s decided to award an additional £10,000 prize that week to keep their fans happy.  If they do something similar in the future, perhaps awarding smaller cash prizes to a mix of random and judged winners would work better.

Highland Spring H2oomph offered the chance to win one of 10,000 experience prizes. Entrants had to input a code from a bottle, but also upload a photo of the code – if you’ve ever tried to take a photo of a faint code printed onto transparent plastic, you’ll know it’s not easy! They found out instantly if they’d entered during a winning moment. But the packaging and advertising didn’t specify how long this winning moment was – and therefore consumers had no idea what the chance of winning was. I complained to the ASA, and before long the information was added to the FAQ page – each winning moment was one second long, meaning that each entry had a 1-in-1296 chance of winning. We can presume not many of those 10,000 prizes were awarded! The ASA ruled that ‘the promotion was misleading and caused unnecessary disappointment for participants’.

The White Creme Egg promotion got a huge amount of coverage in the press – limited edition white Cadbury Creme Eggs were planted in shops all over the UK, and if you found one, you’d won a cash prize! But of course this resulted in grubby little fingers nationwide peeling creme eggs before buying them, and piles of damaged unsellable chocolate eggs in supermarkets. PLUS – the lucky £2,000 egg was never found! But despite that, white creme eggs are returning from 1 January 2019 – and this time round, eight of them are worth £10,000. Let the wrapper-ripping commence….

And that’s it for my list of 2018’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?