It is over a year now since allegations about a phone-in on the Richard and Judy TV show escalated to reveal breaches of rules on competitions across the world of broadcasting. It went on to harm the reputations not just of Channel 4 but also GMTV, Five, ITV and the BBC, including its once-untarnished brand, Blue Peter.
Heads have rolled, fines have been imposed, and investigations have run their course, but there are now signs that the lessons have not been learned across the rest of the media. According to the latest figures from the Institute of Sales Promotion (ISP), the number of complaints it has received from consumers about promotions generally has risen considerably over the past 12 months. This has much to do with consumers being more inclined to make complaints, with websites such as The Winners’ Gallery promoting people’s rights when it comes to entering prize promotions.
However, the figures show that the percentage of complaints relating to newspaper and magazine promotions has increased. Of the 200 complaints received by the ISP from the public over the past year, 50 per cent of them have related to prizes from promotions in the press, chiefly daily newspapers.
“The press has always been at the top of our complaints list but in the last year it has escalated in both numbers of complaints and the proportion,” says Edwin Mutton, who heads compliance at the ISP. “There seems to be an attitude in the press that you run the promotion and hang the fulfilment.”
The institute does not officially police promotions and generally passes on complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which is the independent body for regulating rules laid down in the advertising codes, including the CAP Code that governs promotions. In March alone, it resolved consumer complaints about Northern & Shell, The News of the World and The Sun, among others.
Mutton says that, on the occasions when the ISP does try to sort out simple complaints over prizes not arriving or winners’ lists not being published, publishers show little interest in settling the problem until the ASA is involved. “The alarming thing is that, until we go to the ASA, complaints don’t get anywhere,” he explains. “As soon as the ASA gets involved, they tend to do something. If the ASA doesn’t, they just ignore consumers.”
The biggest complaint about newspaper and magazine promotions is the failure to provide prizes. As well as being a fundamental part of the contract created when a consumer enters a prize draw or competition, this is in breach of the CAP Code which makes it clear that prizes must always be sent unless there is a particular reason that the winners do not qualify.
But at the heart of the problem is ignorance of the responsibilities, as was the case with many of the incidents in the broadcast media last year. The producers who were responsible for some of the competitions and phone-ins lacked the training and experience to appreciate that what they were running amounted to a promotion, policed by the ASA and regulated by the likes of Ofcom and PhonepayPlus (formerly Icstis).
There is a similar environment within the press. “What happens a lot of the time is people go into doing prize draws and sourcing prizes and giving prizes away without realising how much work is involved in doing the job properly,” says Nick Deyong, managing director of NDL Group, which specialises in prize fulfilment for brands, including publishers. “You get somebody who hasn’t got that experience, who maybe works in PR or editorial, and they just think, ‘That’ll be a good idea, it won’t be difficult, I’ll just source a few prizes’. Dealing with prize-winners is handed over to the office junior to sort out but it’s not core to their business.
“It’s not being resourced properly. I don’t believe that any of these people are doing anything intentionally wrongly. They want to get it right. It’s an education process for the people who sign off these projects.”
There is also a particular need for compliance over promotions run to raise revenue for the publisher – the same model used by the broadcasters until this entry route was suspended last year. A premium-rate charge for texts or phone calls for entry is used by a number of publishers, requiring them to comply with PhonepayPlus’s code of practice as well as the CAP Code.
The responsibilities are recognised by some publishers, such as Trinity Mirror which has just appointed a competitions content co-ordinator to work with its commercial director on promotions across Mirror Group Newspapers’ three national titles. Similarly, River Publishing, which produces customer magazines for clients such as Virgin Trains and Superdrug, is a member of the ISP and has a group promotions manager for all its titles. BBC Worldwide, the UK’s third largest publisher of consumer magazines, not only belongs to the ISP but its group marketing manager, Helen Phillips, sits on the ISP’s board.
However, at other publishers, it is a different story. Many journalists tell stories of prizes in a draw or competition sitting for months, forgotten, under the desk of an editor, features editor or editorial assistant, because nobody has time to sort through the winners’ list and mail them out.
This reflects the general lack of awareness of the rules and laws governing sales promotion. For instance, the selection of winners can also be in breach of the Code, which states that “promoters of prize draws should ensure that prizes are awarded in accordance with the laws of chance and under the supervision of an independent observer”. While independent verification companies, such as PromoVeritas, exist for this purpose, it is not unusual at some publishers for a member of staff simply to take round a box of entries and ask a colleague to pick some out.
As Deyong at NDL Group points out, there is a lack of systems for managing a promotion from inception to fulfilment. Without this, a publisher may be caught out if the person who devised the promotion has left by the time the closing date has passed. “They don’t have the systems in place for tracking it,” he says. This can be a particular problem if there is no record of an agreement to supply the prize. “The danger is that you agree a prize verbally and then, when you come back to get the prize weeks or months later, they are no longer working [at the prize provider] or their strategy has changed.”
Companies such as NDL Group argue for the need to outsource management of prizes especially, as Deyong points out, an unhappy prize-winner will complain not just to the regulatory bodies but to friends or through online forums. Libby Christie, head of operations at promotions company Unmissable, says her team ensure that winners are telephoned within 48 hours and contacted by letter and that the fulfilment of prizes is personal and part of a “full brand experience”. “No prize promotion will be effective if the fulfilment goes wrong, no matter how fantastic the prize on offer is,” she says.
Obviously, there are times when even the experts can get it wrong. In 2004, the Daily Express ran into rough waters when its offer of a cruise for £10 attracted an unexpectedly high number of single people, which was then exacerbated by cancellations of trips because of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. However, there are many other promotions being run on a day-to-day basis that are unnecessarily at risk of breaching the rules simply due to a lack of knowledge, experience and systems.
Clive Mishon, the ISP’s chairman, believes it is all about education. “More people are involved in sales promotions while they understand less and less about them,” he explains. “But ignorance is no defence.”