Crap Competitions

Competitions these days are crap.

When I was a lad, competitions were simple, honest affairs. There'd be competitions on children's TV, where the person who sent in the best picture would win a drawing set or get to meet Rolf Harris. Then there'd be competitions on crisp packets where you could win the latest toy.

They were organised either just for the sheer fun of it (e.g. competitions on TV on in newspapers), or for a bit of publicity or as an honest ploy to make people buy more chocolate.

All it cost you to enter was a stamp, and the prize came from the goodness of someone's heart (or the marketing department).

These days, competitions are cynical, engineered affairs that are just treated as another revenue stream. There are even business who do nothing but organise evil, profiteering "competitions" for evil corporate clients.

The thinking goes something like this:

"If we offer a prize worth £1000 and have to pay £500 promotional costs, and earn 50p profit per entry, then if we get 5000 entries, that's £1000 clear profit."

The organisers do extensive research into the target demographic to select a suitably enticing prize and decide how much to charge for entry.

The key difference is that there's no generosity or sense of fun. The cost of the prize must be covered by all the entry fees, and allow them to make a decent profit.

Because the organisers are relying on entry fees to pay for the prize and make a profit, they discourage free entries. They'll get you to enter by SMS (text message), often costing 50p or £1. As you know, normal text messages cost 10p, so the rest is just fat profit. Or there'll be a premium rate phone number costing between 60p and £2 a minute.

Sometimes you can enter for free on the Internet. Sometimes you can't - the organiser will have teamed up with a "microcharging" partner who'll take 50p from your credit card.

Anyway, you get the point: competitions aren't fun anymore, they're just a cynical way of for nasty corporations to make easy money.

Oh, and the worst competitions of all are ones that, in the small print, say that the prize is shared across multiple competitions. Although these aren't as bad as the competitions that cost £5 to enter and the prize is just an overpriced phone contract.