The ten best prize promotions of 2020

As we come to the end of another year, I like to look back at the year’s prize promotions and ask my blog readers and the Lucky Learners Facebook group for their opinion on this year’s successes – and flops!

So, here’s our top ten of 2020 – in no particular order! It’s a real variety this time: photo comps, text comps, on-pack instant wins, kids comps and even a treasure hunt or two.  Some were chosen for their uniqueness, some because they were lots of fun, and others because there was such a great chance of winning a prize!

1. Blossom Hill Friendship Fridays

Blossom Hill brightened up lockdown with their charming Friendship Fridays promotion running over five weeks on Instagram. Entrants shared a photo of themselves with a special friend using the #TogetherLetsBlossom hashtag – if they were one of the first 150 entrants after the competition post went live on a Wednesday at noon, they were rewarded with a box of wine and flowers, with a second box being delivered to their nominated friend! As part of the prize, the 150 weekly winners and their friends were also invited to attend a private Zoom flower arranging class on the following Friday.

Reader feedback: “I loved this competition as it was nice for one prize to be delivered straight to your friend!”

2. Find the Biggest Wotsit

The fun Wotsits Giants competition was widely promoted on Twitter – Walkers were on the hunt for the largest Wotsit! Entrants had to measure the length of the biggest Wotsit in their bag of Wotsits Giants, then share a photo of it on social media with its measurement in millimetres. Walkers chose the 40 longest Wotsits from all entries, and arranged for couriers to collect the specimens from around the UK. Once all measurements were verified, a winner was chosen at random to receive £10,000 and a year’s supply of Giant Wotsits!

Reader feedback: “This competition was such good fun – except the stress of packing up the Wotsit safely to send through the post!“

3. Corona Beach Getaways

Somewhat ironically, one of the year’s big hits happened to be from Corona! Their ‘Beach Getaways’ promotion was advertised in convenience stores, with five hundred prizes of a £200 voucher for a UK Beachfront Hotel Stay spread across 7 weekly prize draws. Entrants used their mobile device to scan their Corona bottle for a prize draw entry, and Co-op shoppers could also enter to win one of 500 Corona coolers instantly. Two comps for the price of one!

Reader feedback: “A great promotion in a year when Corona changed the world!”

4. Mentos Snap Share Win

The generous Mentos selfie prize draw is one of the longest running promotions we’ve encountered – and it’s still open until 31 January 2021 so it’s not too late to take part! Just take a selfie with a pack of Mentos and share on Instagram with @mentosuk, or upload to the Mentos UK Facebook page. There’s daily prizes of cute Mentos gift boxes with 6 packs inside, plus monthly £99.99 BuyAGift vouchers, and after the promotion ends on 31 January 2021 there will be 15 grand prize winners of £1000 BuyAGift vouchers drawn at random.

Reader feedback: “The most fun 2020 comp for me has been the Mentos selfie competition – it’s exciting finding creative ways to use the Mentos packs!”

5. Nestlé Virgin Experience Days

Nestlé awarded ten £200 Virgin Experience Days vouchers every day this summer – 560 prizes in total! Unique codes were printed inside flashed Kit Kat, Aero, Yorkie, Lion, Randoms and Fruit Pastilles packaging and entered into an hourly prize draw, with winners informed immediately after the draw. Compers had heaps of plastic storage tubs crammed with unwrapped chocolate during this promotion – I’m sure I’m not the only one who had a go at making Yorkie cheesecake!

Reader feedback: “The Nestlé promotion was so generous with plenty of chances to win. My husband and I both won and are planning an epic UK road trip next year (Covid permitting) where we can use the vouchers to do things we’ve always wanted to like a hot air balloon ride and overnight stay at a Champneys Spa”

6. Pringles Stack’n’Share

Pringles started 2020 with the Stack’n’Share promotion, which ran for four months! Entrants created a stack of three different flavour Pringles, then took a selfie with it and shared on social media with #PringlesStackNShare. Winners were chosen at random each week – with a total of 1392 prizes awarded this was incredibly generous. The prizes included dining experiences, £50 restaurant gift cards and hundreds of boxes containing 19 cans of Pringles! Let’s hope Pringles will do another fun photo comp in 2021.

Reader feedback: ” I liked the fun entry process – it wasn’t just a simple click to like, but at the other extreme we weren’t expected to construct the Eiffel Tower!”

7. Vodafone Find Unlimited

Vodafone Find Unlimited was a quirky augmented reality treasure hunt, originally designed for residents in five major UK cities to play on the streets. During the lockdown the game was adapted so people could play from home – but only between 11am and 2pm each day! With 12,400 prizes to be won ranging from £5 Google Play vouchers to Samsung Galaxy phones, my guess is that most participants ended up winning at least one prize.

Reader feedback: “Find Unlimited was an exciting virtual hunt with a high chance of getting a prize. In contrast Doritos used the same format but diluted and restricted playability to a point it was barely worth taking part.”

8. Fruit Shoot Dream Thing

Fruit Shoot ran two lovely purchase-necessary promotions in 2020. The first one – Draw Your Dream Thing – was for Tesco customers – entrants needed to buy Fruit Shoot, then upload their child’s drawing of their dream thing to the competition website. Every day one entrant chosen at random won a Crayola prize pack. Later in the summer, Win Their Dream Thing gave kids the chance to instantly win their dream prize up to £5,000. A hundred runners up won a family experience too, so there were lots of opportunities to win across both these promotions.

Reader feedback: “We won a couple of Fruit shoot competitions. My 6 year old’s drawing won him a Crayola prize pack and my other child won a trip to the safari park, which was really great (especially their flexibility on prize choice and that we could go whilst maintaining social distancing)”

9. Pepsi & Doritos Perfect Match

Pepsi, Walkers & Doritos always have generous budgets for their prize promotions, and the 2020 version of Perfect Match was no exception! 402 TVs, 583 soundbars and thousands of beanbags and snack bundles were awarded. All you had to do was enter your batch code online and wait to see if you got two matching icons – if you did, you won a prize instantly! Simple but really popular.

Reader feedback: “This promotion had lots of good value prizes and was easy to win!”

10. Morrisons & Hophouse 13

Standard rate text entry prize draws are popular with SuperLucky readers, and are so easy to enter! The Hophouse 13 promotion was advertised in store at Morrisons. Two cases of Hophouse lager were sent out to a whopping 500 lucky random winners – one of those rare promotions where it’s difficult to lose!

Reader feedback: “This was great because of the sheer amount of prizes! I think most of us won a couple of boxes.”

11. Captain Morgan Captain’s Gold

Yes, I know it’s a top ten list – but I couldn’t miss out this great one from Captain Morgan, which was launched too late to make my original top ten!

The ‘Captain’s Gold’ Instagram promotion is a visual delight. The innovative Treasure Hunt starts at instagram.com/captainmorgangb – there are clues to find and puzzles to solve which will take the participants all over Instagram. When they’ve figured it all out to reach the final destination, they just needed to LIKE the final post to enter the prize draw to win one of 42 prizes including one of three X-Boxes!

Reader feedback: “The Captain Morgan promotion looks fantastic and is such a clever way to use Instagram – the amount of work that’s gone into creating the graphics is huge! It was a great way to spend a lunch hour.”

Near misses…

There were lots of other fantastic prize draws and competitions that didn’t quite make it onto the list. Compers enjoyed the Oreo Twin to Win and Maltesers Bunnies Snapchat competitions, although they were fiddly to get to grips with! The Baking Mad Make It Together Instagram promotion with prizes of 40 Kitchenaid stand mixers (20 winners also won one for a nominated friend) was wonderfully generous, but was let down by unclear T&Cs. Roddas Bake Your Wonderful promotion also offered lots of weekly random prizes to people who shared their baking successes on Instagram. While Most Wanted Wines brightened up December with their imaginative Tunes Challenge to play a Christmas tune on wine glasses, they didn’t stick to their T&Cs when choosing their 151 winners, and many entrants were left disappointed.

There were so many fantastic competitions and prize draws to nominate key workers this year – a few of the amazing generous promoters giving away hundreds of hotel stays and holidays to deserving key workers and NHS staff were Sea Containers, Sawdays, Harbour Hotels, The Pig Hotel, Point A Hotels, Lay Z Spa, Barbados Tourist Board, Mr & Mrs Smith and more. In addition, Alpro gave away 150 Breakfast hampers including a Nutribullet to Lockdown Heroes – entrants could nominate anyone who had been wonderful to them during lockdown, including family members and neighbours.

Tesco deserve a mention too – they’ve had some amazing text entry prize draws and instant wins this year, and it’s been great to see the introduction of purchase-necessary prize draws for Doritos, Schwartz and Nat Bears where you have to upload a photo of your receipt before you enter. Unfortunately Tesco still can’t seem to manage to get full T&Cs published on their competition page until the promotions have been running for at least a week which is infuriating!

…and the WORST competition of 2020?

There weren’t actually that many competitions that made our blood boil this year, although the increase in new ‘pay to enter’ rip-off raffle websites has been incredibly frustrating! So we decided there was just one promotion deserving of the award for worst competition of 2020… congratulations to Total Worldfresh!

Co-op Strawberries Love Great British

In June, we were excited to see stickers appear on Co-op Strawberries advertising a whopping £100k of Co-op gift cards in their Love Great British promotion. On the reverse of the sticker was a unique code to enter online for a chance to win instantly.

Not only were the flashed promotional packs of strawberries incredibly hard to track down, but the information on the sticker was minimal, and didn’t make clear that this was an algorithmic promotion (so the 2,500 advertised prizes would ONLY be awarded if every single code from a stickered pack of strawberries was entered online). And guess how many instant win prizes were actually awarded? Just 4 out of 2,500 prizes, a piddling 0.16% of the advertised prize fund! It’s shocking that a promoter can get away with such misleading advertising, and hopefully we’ll see them being more honest in 2021.

And that’s it for my list of 2020’s best and worst prize promotions! Leave a comment to let me know which were your top comps this year – and did you win a prize in any of the ones I’ve mentioned?