Is Your Sweepstakes Being Hijacked?

GREETINGS FROM THE SWEEPSTAKES AND PROMOTIONAL GAMING FULFILLMENT TRENCHES! Those of us who provide your P.O. Boxes, sort through your sweepstakes entries, conduct your random drawings, and contact your prizewinners have some disquieting news to report:

Your mail-in sweepstakes and second-chance drawings are being stealthily and steadily hijacked by a burgeoning cottage industry – sweepstakes newsletter clubs. Consider this testimonial from an online sweepstakes newsletter:

I have been sweepstaking for four years…I have won a total of about 100 prizes. Some of them: a couple of $100 checks; a gold nugget from Dow Brands; a travel bag from Snickers, and a Super Nintendo from Pepsi/Eckerd. My husband has been sweepstaking for about two years off and on…This morning he received a telephone call from the Tropicana ’96 Days Of Summer’ Sweeps and won $1,000!

And how about this hard-driving gamer? Quite a lucrative hobby, no?

This week I’m coming up to my first anniversary as a sweepstaker…By fall I had started winning 2-3 prizes a week. Then the week before Thanksgiving I received an affidavit from Seagram’s Gin that I was the Grand Prize Winner of $10,000 in the Electrifying Lady Sweeps! Then on Saturday of that same week I got an affy from HBO/Chevrolet that I had won a Chevy Lumina!

How do these clubbers do it? Members subscribe on an annual basis to receive a monthly or weekly newsletter (either a printed or online publication) that profiles national, regional, and local sweepstakes as well as second-chance drawings. No-purchase-necessary entry details and brief synopses of the official rules are provided. Subscribers are also provided with entry tips to improve their chances of winning. Here are a few such chestnuts:

“If you have children or older folks around, put them to work! Even small children can lick and stuff envelopes.”

“When sealing envelopes in quantity, spread out a dozen or more at a time with the flaps up. The more you do this, the faster, you’ll become.”

Want to encounter the beast face-to-face? Go online and enter the words “Sweepstakes + Newsletter” into your trusty search engine. Chances are, your current sweepstakes will be profiled in at least one of the online newsletters that present themselves.

Now I’m sure some marketers out there are saying, “Aw heck, how much havoc can a network of bored homemakers and retirees wreak on my national promotion?” Here’s the ugly truth:

There is an excellent chance that the winner of your next sweepstakes will be someone who never bought your product, never saw the promotion at retail, never saw your magazine or FSI placement, never filled out your official entry form, and is not part of your demographic target.

In your next mail-in sweepstakes, you may receive more entries on 3 x 5 cards than those submitted on your pre-printed official entry form. If your sweepstakes is profiled in more than one major newsletter, you can expect to receive 25 percent to 45 percent of your total entries via this backdoor participation channel.

If you are conducting a match-and-win, scratch-and-win, collect-and-win, or instant-win game, and you plan to award unclaimed prizes via a second-chance drawing, it is very likely that the winners you select never participated in the game – never matched, scratched, collected, or even held gamepieces in their hands.

What’s a marketer to do? Legally, there is no way to segment or exclude entries because they came from a member of a sweepstakes club. “No purchase necessary” means just that. Each entrant must be offered a proportionately equal chance of winning as long as he or she has adhered to the official rules of the promotion.

Here, however, are some practical options to consider:

Stay the course. Creatively conceived sweepstakes and games of chance that offer unique prizes and/or compelling play value will still be appealing to your intended target audience. Even if the bulk of your prize pool is won by professional sweepstakers, that doesn’t mean that the promotion hasn’t accomplished its objectives. A word of caution, however: If your promotion is featured in one or more of the most popular sweepstakes newsletters, your handling, sorting, and database creation costs will be proportionately affected.

Limit the number of per-household entries – and police such policies aggressively. By including limitations on the number of entries per household address in your published rules, you can discourage mass mailings from sweepstakes club members. Unfortunately, professional sweepstakers often ignore such warnings, because fulfillment services don’t always actively police this limitation. In a recent fast-food promotion, I counted nearly 50 entry forms from one participant who violated the one-entry limit. What grand prize was apparently worth spending over $15 in postage to win, you ask? One hundred dollars in fast-food gift certificates. Yummy.

Consider skill contests. Not only do skill contests (coloring, photo, trivia, and essay contests) allow marketers to require product purchase as a prerequisite for contest entry, they are generally not attractive to professional sweepstakers. It takes far less time to fill out 50 3 x 5 cards than it does to compose a clever essay. The cost of convening a panel of judges to review each entry makes such contests more expensive on a per-entry basis, but your entries are more likely to be received from actual product purchasers.

So relax, take a deep breath, and try to refrain from cutting up all the index cards in your supply closet.

Now I’m sure some marketers out there are saying, “Aw heck, how much havoc can a network of bored homemakers and retirees wreak on my national promotion?” Here’s the ugly truth:

There is an excellent chance that the winner of your next sweepstakes will be someone who never bought your product, never saw the promotion at retail, never saw your magazine or FSI placement, never filled out your official entry form, and is not part of your demographic target.

In your next mail-in sweepstakes, you may receive more entries on 3 x 5 cards than those submitted on your pre-printed official entry form. If your sweepstakes is profiled in more than one major newsletter, you can expect to receive 25 percent to 45 percent of your total entries via this backdoor participation channel.

If you are conducting a match-and-win, scratch-and-win, collect-and-win, or instant-win game, and you plan to award unclaimed prizes via a second-chance drawing, it is very likely that the winners you select never participated in the game – never matched, scratched, collected, or even held gamepieces in their hands.

What’s a marketer to do? Legally, there is no way to segment or exclude entries because they came from a member of a sweepstakes club. “No purchase necessary” means just that. Each entrantmust be offered a proportionately equal chance of winning as long as he or she has adhered to the official rules of the promotion.

Here, however, are some practical options to consider:

Stay the course. Creatively conceived sweepstakes and games of chance that offer unique prizes and/or compelling play value will still be appealing to your intended target audience. Even if the bulk of your prize pool is won by professional sweepstakers, that doesn’t mean that the promotion hasn’t accomplished its objectives. A word of caution, however: If your promotion is featured in one or more of the most popular sweepstakes newsletters, your handling, sorting, and database creation costs will be proportionately affected.

Limit the number of per-household entries – and police such policies aggressively. By including limitations on the number of entries per household address in your published rules, you can discourage mass mailings from sweepstakes club members. Unfortunately, professional sweepstakers often ignore such warnings, because fulfillment services don’t always actively police this limitation. In a recent fast-food promotion, I counted nearly 50 entry forms from one participant who violated the one-entry limit. What grand prize was apparently worth spending over $15 in postage to win, you ask? One hundred dollars in fast-food gift certificates. Yummy.

Consider skill contests. Not only do skill contests (coloring, photo, trivia, and essay contests) allow marketers to require product purchase as a prerequisite for contest entry, they are generally not attractive to professional sweepstakers. It takes far less time to fill out 50 3 x 5 cards than it does to compose a clever essay. The cost of convening a panel of judges to review each entry makes such contests more expensive on a per-entry basis, but your entries are more likely to be received from actual product purchasers.

So relax, take a deep breath, and try to refrain from cutting up all the index cards in your supply closet.